The Crumpled Mirror by Elizabeth Loea (free novel reading sites TXT) 📕

I’m glad he was honest, but after seeing what he can do, I’m worried he’ll do something drastic to pass. More drastic than setting a few trees on fire or turning the water in the pond to solid ice, that is.

I think he may have done something to my visions, too. They used to be of my future, but now they seem to be of someone else’s. The children are always there.

This time, the note was dated. It was from ten years ago—from the last test. From the test Mint had most likely died during, considering his age.

I’d pinned the note to my bulletin board along with the one Amaranth had left before. Together, they made a fascinating story.

I’d tried to shake off that fascination when I got to school.

Stepping through the sliding glass doors out of the fog was like walking into a dream. The last forty-eight hours should have felt like the dream, but this was the part that seemed most unnatural. The hallways, pasted in vibrant, half-assed student posters, might as well have been a maze. It took asking a fellow student to find my classroom. I forgot which seat I sat in, I tripped over my own boots, and I forgot to say hi to one of only two friends I had in the class.

I was in danger.

Someone knew where I lived. Whoever had written those journal pages had taken these tests, and I doubted things had ended well for them. Deaths were popping up around my friends and near me. I had killed a man the night before (although, to be fair, he’d been brought back right after, so did it really count?). My life should have been falling apart. It was falling apart.

And I couldn’t stop smiling.

I trained my gaze on the fog outside the window and wished for a cup of coffee.

Fortunately, Ginger saved me from a morning of sleepiness and boredom.

She slid into the desk next to me so quietly, I barely registered it was her, but she was unmistakable; there were those pale blonde curls spilling across her muscular shoulders. She’d changed since I had last seen her and now looked thoroughly out of place, wearing a grey tank top in the frigid NorCal weather.

“Clementine,” she greeted me, and passed a cardboard cup to me. “Thought you could use this.”

“You—” I started. “How...why?”

“I didn’t have anything better to do than to follow you to school. Lilac’s visiting family, Adrian’s busy watching TV, and Indigo’s being a boring asshole in the library.”

“A boring asshole?”

“He told me to either help with his research or find something useful to do.”

I cocked an eyebrow at Ginger and took a sip from my coffee as my classmates trickled in. Vivi stood in the doorway, watching me and disappearing occasionally when a body passed through her ghostly form.

“Okay,” Ginger said. “So he didn’t exactly kick me out, but there’s literally nothing more boring than sitting in a room full of books watching someone else be more interested in words on a piece of paper than in talking to me. And I figured following you would lead me to something worth my time. So what is this?”

“High school?” I offered.

“We’re at sea level. How can it be high?”

“You’ve never been to high school?”

She shrugged as a girl paced impatiently next to the desk Ginger had chosen to occupy. “Our school system is one chunk of education from the time you’re four to the time you’re twenty. Besides, I never went to school, period. My parents taught me everything I needed to know. I’m not brilliant like Lilac with her dozen languages or whatever, but I didn’t need to sit in a building with a bunch of other teenagers to learn what I needed to know.”

The girl standing by the desk coughed, but Ginger waved her off without even glancing in her direction. The girl looked at me for help, realized she wouldn’t get any, and stomped to a desk in the back of the classroom.

“So,” Ginger continued, “what do we do here?”

“We sit for an hour or so while a teacher talks and then we go to another classroom and do it again.”

“You’re kidding,” she said. “You’re fucking kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“Okay,” she said. “And—”

She was cut off by the entrance of a substitute teacher. He was handsome, but not striking: he stood at about six feet, his frame that of a man who had been a track star in high school and had exercised less and less ever since. He didn’t look particularly interested in the class, but there was something nervous and off-putting about his demeanor. I would have placed him in his mid-twenties, perhaps older, his dark hair beginning to grey prematurely near the hairline. If I had to guess, I would have assumed he’d grown up in Half Moon Bay, like me, largely because of his SFSU sweatshirt.

“Who’s that?” Ginger muttered to me.

He heard her and spoke to us in a low, oddly sweet tone. “I should ask who you are,” he said. “There’s one extra person in this classroom and I expect, from the fact that you didn’t bring a bookbag or any supplies at all, that it is you.”

“She’s visiting,” I interjected. “I’m showing her around so she can see whether or not she wants to attend.”

“I don’t have a visitor on my list today.” He glanced between us, searching for something. At his side, his hand twitched a little—not out of anger, but clearly out of nerves.

“Your list must be wrong,” I told him—the classic line for high school students and other liars. “I can show you the email the vice principal sent me about it if you want, but I assure you she’s here on purpose.”

I was bluffing, of course. Fortunately, I’d been bluffing half my life—bluffing my way into bookstores, into crime scenes, into conversations about magic. I’d been bluffing ever since my parents had moved to Dallas and my mom had started calling to