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

The teacher knew I was bluffing, for sure. He didn’t call me out on it, fortunately, but he shot Ginger a glance that would have made anyone else shrink away.

She held it. Moreover, she took a sip of her coffee, never once breaking eye contact.

“Okay,” he said, and called roll. This was a bit of an issue for me—Ginger didn’t know my real name and wasn’t supposed to learn it. I nudged her to put her fingers in her ears and to hum to drown out the names being called. She glared at me the entire time, but it was worth the privacy.

“Alright,” said the substitute. “Today we’ll be returning to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I believe you did the reading?”

A series of halfhearted confirmations followed. Usually, substitutes just gave us a free period and left to flirt with the lunch ladies. It seemed that we would have to do actual work today.

“Magic in a forest,” he said. “We like to place the unnatural out of our direct frame of vision. Even people who live in the middle of a forest don’t see too much beyond their own house, their own yard. Midsummer entraps and ensnares the four Athenian youths in the forest, forcing them to reckon with the dangerous reality of magic.”

Magic in the forest, I thought. I locked eyes with Ginger and she nodded her agreement: This man knew about us. Either that or our day was just filled with coincidences.

“So what of the woods?” the substitute asked. Panic filled me and I tried to keep my breath slow and even. If this man meant us no harm, we might be able to get some answers from him. If he was dangerous, however...well, there was only one exit. At my side, Ginger was too relaxed, smiling even.

I raised my hand and the substitute called on me.

“Safety,” I said. “They provide safety in Midsummer. In Midsummer, terrible things happen to Titania, but the forest keeps her physically safe even as she temporarily loses her mind. If she were to leave, who knows what would happen?”

“Good,” he said, but he still seemed unsatisfied with my answer. He turned to the whiteboard while Ginger and I exchanged the expression of the eternally put-upon high school student.

“Safety,” he repeated. “And power.”

Ginger and I exchanged another glance. I’d only known her for a couple of days, but I was sure that expression—wide eyes, a wicked smile, tense shoulders—she was planning something risky and probably fun.

It was that moment when I realized that everyone I was testing for Robin College alongside was probably completely out of their minds. That was the conclusion all evidence pointed to, at least.

“What?” I hissed in her general direction.

“Clementine,” she said under her breath. “Get us kicked out.”

“What? Why?”

“I get a bad vibe from him.”

“You can’t just go off of what kind of vibe you get from him,” I grumbled.

“I’m a sympathetic,” she reminded me. “I’m—”

“Girls,” the substitute interjected. “This isn’t lunch hour.”

Ginger slumped back in her chair and glanced at me with the kind of petulant expression you only see on your younger cousins at family holidays.

It only took her a couple of minutes to get bored enough to write a note. She slid it over to me as surreptitiously as possible.

I opened it, took a glance, and snorted.

The substitute interfered.

“Read it aloud.”

At that point, I was riding high. I’d been on cloud nine for the last two days—regardless of the fact that I’d just killed a kid, regardless of the fact that murders were popping up around us—so I turned the note to face him and glanced at Ginger, who clearly couldn’t care less.

“It says, ‘Clementine--fuck you. Love, Ginger,’ sir,” I said.

He took a moment to steady himself. That was when I noticed what was so off about him: he had no briefcase, no backpack. Even substitutes carried stuff with them. Where were his notes? Even the clipboard where he should have been taking attendance was just empty when I took a closer look at it.

All he held was a thumbed-through copy of Midsummer.

“I’ll just go to the office,” I said, taking a hold of Ginger’s elbow. Something was wrong. Through the open window next to me, the foggy day began to smell of smoke and thunder. “Sorry.”

“Sit,” he said. “And stay after class so I can talk to both of you.”

Ginger shook her head at me. I’d never seen fear in her eyes before, even when I’d killed Adrian the night before. She must have read something in his mind or in his emotions that had made her so desperate to leave.

I slid back into my seat.

The substitute glanced out the window. Something about him crackled, shivered, fell apart and rebuilt itself every second. I didn’t have a strong sense of magic at the time, but I’d started to be able to differentiate between magic with malice and magic with good intent.

I didn’t feel either evil or good on his magic. Just strength. And desperation.

A desperate magician is the most dangerous thing in the world. Something quavered within him, something bright and sharp and full of teeth, and then the substitute collapsed to his knees in front of the desk.

My classmates must have been having the most unusual day. I suppose I was, too, but something about it was slower and easier to stomach than it would have been a couple days before.

The substitute glanced up. He wasn’t supposed to look like that, was he? His eyes glazed and began to glow a pale silver. His fingers started to go grey at the ends and then to flake, slowly but surely.

Ginger was on her feet in a moment, her desk scraping across the floor as she leaped onto her chair.

“Everybody out!” she shouted. Teenagers streamed from the classroom, some with their phones and backpacks and others without. Chatter and whispers filled the hall. They had no place to go, but surely a hall monitor would find them in