“Hey Winter,” one of the hydra girls called as I jogged around the track, “shouldn’t you be melting in the heat by now?  Right, Winter?  It’s almost summer now, you should be long gone.”

 Uh-huh.  How original.  Not like I’d heard stupid stuff like that before.  Like, say, all my life.

The hydra girl and her friend seemed determined, though.  When I stopped to get a drink of water, they neared me, intent on continuing making fun of me.

“I can’t believe you don’t change your name.  What kind of name even is that?  You’re named after a season?  Come on, you’re just asking to be made fun of!”

I had been ignoring her, because I didn’t care about her words, but now I gave her a brief icy glare.  “My mother gave me my name.  I would never give it up.”  Even if it caused me some bullying, I would never begrudge my name.  It was a gift to me from my mother that could never be taken away.

“Your mother?”  The hydra girl exchanged a glance with her friend, a giggly hydra girl who seemed to go along with whatever the other one said.  “Isn’t she the one who ran off and abandoned you?  And you’re keeping a stupid name she gave you?”

My fingers on my water bottle tightened.  “My mother didn’t abandon me,” I corrected coldly.  “She abandoned this town and the war that goes with it.”  Then I dropped my water – well, now ice – bottle back on the bleachers and resumed my jog around the track.

PE class was run by a hydra, so naturally the hydras basically could do whatever they wanted this period while kapras would be pushed to their limit, unless they just grouped up and ignored the teacher, which was also an option.  It was an option which generally resulted in some magic exchange and detention, but hey, someone always did it.  I didn’t care enough to fight the order to keep running, so I just jogged around the track the whole time, barely glancing at Mark as he sat alone on the bleachers, trying to wave surreptitiously at me when he was sure no one else was looking.

Once class was finally over, I grabbed my slushy water bottle and started heading back to the lockers.  When I got out of the showers and changed back into my regular clothes, I was surprised to find a hydra girl lingering in the locker room, apparently waiting for me.

Not the one who’d mocked my name, or her friend, but I’d noticed this one nearby during the conversation.  She looked hesitant now, and maybe a little scared, like she wasn’t sure about this, but it was pretty clear she was waiting for me since I was the only other person in the locker room by then.

“My mom left, too!”  She burst out abruptly.  “Because of the war.  She was a shifter Dad met in college and she tried, she really did.  She wanted to stick it out for us kids, but she couldn’t put up with it anymore, so she just…she left.  She just left us, though.”  She wrapped her arms around herself, looking forlorn.  “She didn’t even try to take the three of us with her.  I mean, Dad would have been furious, he might have tried to hunt her down and take us back by force if she had, but we didn’t even get the option.  I…,” her voice got quieter, “I would have liked to go with her.”

Ah.  So I was right, there were other kids from my generation who were trapped here by this stupid war.  This girl and her siblings were stuck, and like me, they had family they still cared about here, but their family had been ripped apart by this war and they’d lost their mother as a result.  Sure, she was still out there somewhere, but I doubted that was much consolation when they were left to deal with the fight here alone.  With their dad, who sounded like he might be one of the enthusiastic war supporters.

“The war takes a lot of casualties people don’t talk about,” I agreed as I tossed my gym clothes into my bag.  “Almost everyone who comes in from out of town eventually leaves.  Even if they leave family behind.  It’s just too much for them.  Then we end up with broken families and kids who don’t get to see a parent regularly.”

“It’s not fair,” she said in almost a whisper.  “It’s not fair at all.”

She was right, it wasn’t fair.

We split ways without saying anything more to each other, but at the same time, it was a bit of a comfort to know that there was someone else who understood.  Someone who also felt the pain of a broken family thanks to this whole stupid feud.

The days and weeks following passed slowly, slowly inching towards finishing my senior year and then making decisions for what came after.  The days were filled with more of the same, more stupid arguments between Bill and Marilyn, more attempts to get me dragged in, more lectures from my family about not supporting Marilyn enough, more favoritism or discrimination from teachers.

It was all just so…mundane.  Every day just like another, just filled with more of this nonsense.  I was tired of it all, and so not interested in it anymore.

At least graduation represented a potential reprieve.  I knew my family expected me to stay, but the only reason I would consider it was for Mother.  She was a big reason to stay, though, because I didn’t know how long she had left, but she was also aware that I didn’t want to stay in this town any longer than I had to.

Mark, meanwhile, was looking forward to graduation with a passion, and didn’t hide it during our midnight rendezvous.

“I’ve been saving money secretly,” he confessed one night as we laid on the forest floor, looking up at the stars barely visible through the autumn treetops.  “Dad said something recently, I think he knows I want to leave, and he’s not okay with it, so I know if I leave it’ll be on my own, which means I’ll have to keep the money safe because he’ll definitely take it if he finds out about it and guesses what it’s for.  I’ve been really careful hiding it so he can’t find it, but I have a bit saved up.  Enough for a few months, I think, and hopefully by then I can get a job or something.”

He looked up at the stars, a pained expression coming across his face.  “You know what I’d want to do more than anything?”  He asked abruptly.  “I want to go there.”  He pointed to the sky.  “Not that star, particularly, but space.  I want to be an astronaut.  I’m good at math and physics, too.  I could do it, only I can’t thanks to our stupid school.  To stand a chance of being an astronaut, you have to go to the best schools and stuff.  It’s really competitive, only a handful of people ever get to do it.  And with our school?  I’ll be lucky to get into a community college, and I’ll have to work to pay for it.  No scholarships or anything.  I’ll never get a chance to be an astronaut.”  His expression turned devastated.  “My chances were always slim, but they got nixed before I even knew they could have existed.  All because I was born in this stupid town with this stupid school that doesn’t teach us anything.”

I rolled over on my side and reached out to grab his hand.  He needed some sort of comfort right now.  “I’m sorry,” I told him sincerely.  I knew it wasn’t much, but it was all I really could tell him.

Mark’s dream had been stolen from him the moment he found it.  It sucked, I knew that.  I knew how much it hurt him that he could never do what he wanted, especially when the reason for that wasn’t even his fault.

“Maybe you can still work with astronauts,” I suggested.  “Helping them.  I know it won’t be the same thing as being able to go out into space yourself, but you could help them and working with a space station means you’d get to be closer to seeing new discoveries and things.”

He thought about it.  “Yeah, maybe,” he agreed at last.  “It would at least be the closest thing to my dream I could possibly get.”

I wanted to give him hope that maybe he could still be an astronaut anyway, but I suspected it would just be a false hope and it sounded like he’d done the research to find out what he’d need to become one, and knew it was hopeless.  I didn’t need to make it worse.

“Have you looked for where you want to go?”  I asked.

“Yeah, there’s some cities on the other side of the country that supposedly have some good supernatural populations and have a lot of universities and colleges in the area.  Avenglade, Serentown, and Havensville all look like good possibilities.  Avenglade has a reputation for having a supernatural council that tries to help people, too, so I might go there – maybe they’ll be able to help me get a job and stuff even if my high school diploma will be a joke.”  He was quiet for a bit.  “I’m trying to start looking for a job now, though, and a place to live.  I figure if I can get it lined up, maybe go ahead and pay for 6 months or something so I don’t have to worry about Dad finding my money and taking it, then it’ll feel more like it’s actually happening.  I’ll have to head across the lake to the human town to get a bus ride over there, but that’s not so bad.”

 We were both quiet for a bit, thinking.  Then Mark suddenly rolled onto his side, facing me.

“What are you planning to do, Winter?  You’ve never answered me directly when I’ve asked about whether you’re leaving or not.”  He bit his lip, looking anxious.

He didn’t have to spell it out.  He wanted me to come with him.  I understood that – it would feel a lot more feasible to face the world with your best friend at your side.  Alone, it would feel a lot more daunting to strike out as an 18-year-old and hope that he could find a job and get a proper education and make his career work.

But the problem was, I didn’t actually have an answer.  It all depended on how Mother was doing, and he didn’t know about Mother.  It wasn’t like I didn’t think he could handle learning that my mom was a giant dragon who stayed not that far from town, and had for years, but…well…things were complicated.  There were reasons no one was supposed to know about Mother.  And it was her call, after all, that he shouldn’t know.

I shifted so I was lying on my back again, looking up at the night sky.  “I don’t know,” I told him.  “I’m still…waiting to see how things go.”

“With what?”  He demanded.  “School?  You’ll graduate, we all do – they don’t want us to stay behind.  Are you waiting to see if you’d get a decent job here?  It’s not like there are any in town that are decent.  Every job is trapped behind this whole war.  Are you waiting for your family to be more understanding?  They won’t be, not if they haven’t after all these years.”  He paused ever so slightly.  “Are you waiting to see if it’s worth it to be Marilyn’s lackey?”

I could hear the genuine concern in his voice, the fear that I might actually be willing to be swayed to really join a side in this fight, if the offer form Marilyn was good enough.

“No,” I responded instantly.  “I don’t plan to help Marilyn ever.  I don’t want a job here, and I don’t want anything from my family.”

“Then what?”  He pressed, still on his side looking at me.  “What is holding you here so you can’t make up your mind?”

Mark was idealistic in some ways.  He wouldn’t understand the idea of a soulmate having a secret from him, at least not one that was as big as my mom being a dragon living nearby.  Or the fact that she was dying.  I didn’t want to hurt him by telling him I couldn’t tell him the truth, but I also couldn’t tell him the truth, so I had to find something else to tell him instead.

“I don’t know if I should stay and try to be the voice of reason,” I said at last, remembering my conversation with Mother on that topic.  “Whether I should speak up for everyone who wants this war to end.  I know there’s you and me who don’t like the fight, and I know that other people are out there, but since it’s basically taboo to suggest you don’t support the war, people aren’t willing to talk about it openly, so I don’t know how much support there is for it ending.  I guess…I guess a part of me wants to see if I can find others that feel the same and if it would be enough of a backing that they’d have to listen.”

Mark stared at me for a long moment, then flopped onto his back.  “I thought we’d decided that we couldn’t be responsible for ending the war, that no single person could do that,” he grumbled.  “It sounds really dangerous, Winter.  You know they’d rather kill you than let you publicly argue against the war ending.”

He wasn’t wrong.  But there was still a part of me that wondered if someone needed to stand up and say what at least some members of the town were thinking, consequences be damned.  Did that someone need to be me?  I didn’t know.  When we’d had our magical tests to determine who had the most magic and would be the nest kapra leader, Marilyn had more magic than anyone else in our generation, and from what Mark had said, the same was true with Bill.  Could I really stand up against her – against both of them – and argue that they were wrong?  Someone needed to, but there was a very good chance that without enough of the town behind them, the person who said that would die, and then things might get even worse for the people who wanted to support that idea.  I didn’t want to make things worse.  But I also didn’t see how I could challenge Marilyn or Bill magically, at least not at this point, and without that?  Was there any way to make them listen?

“I don’t know,” I said at last.  “It’s just an idea I’ve been kicking around.  Trying to figure out if there’s a chance that there’s enough people who want the war to end that if someone finally stood up and said something, they’d come out of the woodwork and agree.”

“It’s a huge risk, because if you’re wrong, or they’re too scared to stand up with you?”  Mark looked over at me, his eyes worried.  “Then you’d be on your own against them.”

Which would mean they’d kill me for treason, I knew.  And there was a strong likelihood that everyone who did want the war to end wouldn’t say anything if I spoke up, at least not at first – they’d be too scared to, not without proof that they wouldn’t get killed if they agreed.  But if they didn’t agree, then I’d die.

It was kind of a vicious cycle.  I didn’t know if I could break it, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be the one to do it, but I did wish something could change.  I just couldn’t see a way to make it happen.

Mark didn’t have any answers for that, either, just concern about my tentative idea – which I admitted to him before we parted ways for the night was unlikely to happen – so we ended up heading to our homes without an answer as to what I would do after graduation.