“To be fair, would you fuck that tall, creepy dude they all hang out with? He screams townie reject, and he growls at people. Growls!” Girl Two tsks. “And does he ever change clothes? I swear I see him in the exact same thing every day.”
“I don’t know. He’s kind of cute,” the other girl comments, and hums along with the sound of running water as she washes her hands.
“Yeah, so was Ted Bundy,” Girl Two scoffs. “Don’t blame me if the cops find you buried in the woods missing a head.”
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!
I can’t stand it anymore and burst out of the stall, causing both girls to yelp in surprise.
“Fuck you!” I screech, stalking toward them. “You don’t know them. You don’t know anything about them.”
“Ew. Were you just standing there listening the entire time?” Girl Two exclaims, falling back against the sink, while looking at me like I’m some type of cockroach that’s scurried across the floor. “Talk about creepy.”
“I’mcreepy,” I snarl, stomping closer, my magic filling my veins with cool destruction. “You were the ones talking aboutmyalleged sex life like it’s any of your business.”
Girl One stands tall and does a head wiggle—the universal female sign of ‘bring it.’ “Look, girl, don’t act like a hoe if you don’t want people to call you on it, okay?”
Girl Two flips back her long blonde hair and with a twitch of her nose, laments, “We’re just saying what everyone is already talking about.”
“Then everyone needs to stop talking!” I shout, followed by a massive surge of magic.
Terror fills the girls’ eyes when they open their mouths and nothing comes out. I panic when they race for the door, their faces contorted into screams no one can hear.
“Don’t move!” I command, and they freeze in place.
“Uh, Callie?” Felix yells from the other side of the door. “Is everything okay? There are a lot of people coming out of classrooms with their hands around their throats and a whole lot of nothing coming out of their mouths.”
Oh shit. What have I done? How many people did I turn mute?
The answer is likely a lot, if the lethargy I’m feeling is any indication. Leaning against the wall, I call out, “Casper, can you, um, come in here?”
Felix pokes his head through the door and sees my frozen, silent hostages. “Holy shit. What happened?”
“They were saying all of these awful things, and I might have accidentally cast a spell that made everyone mute,” I confess. My knees buckle, and I fall to the ground.
“Callie!” Felix shouts, racing through the girls to my side. They don’t shiver…because they can’t move.
“I’m okay-ish. I need to fix this,” I mumble, slumped against the wall.
“Is there like a spell version of Ctrl-Z?” he asks, kneeling down beside me. His current t-shirt is, of course, a tech reference. A picture of an old computer with the tagline “My memory is terrible.”
“Unfortunately, no. My aunt was pretty insistent that there wasn’t a magical undo spell,” I tell him, my mind going into super panic mode, while my limbs feel like they’re dead weights.
“You said that you just will something and it happens, right?” Felix supplies, running his hands through his soft brown hair. “Can you just will everyone to talking again?”
“I can try.” Sitting up the best I can, I close my eyes and take deep, measured breaths.Please let this work.Imagining that everyone can speak again, I chant, “Undo what I have done. Allow those I’ve silenced to speak once more.”
My pounding headache and the muffled shrieking from the girls thankfully means it worked, only what do I do now? I have who-the-fuck-knows how many people running around that are definitely going to talk about how they were all mute for a minute, and these girls are well aware I did it.
“You did it!” he praises, then frowns when he sees my very unhappy face.
“I need to make them forget it happened,” I announce, too tired to fidget.If I’m some kind of goddess, why am I so tired?
“Okay,” he whispers, fidgeting enough for the both of us, moving his hands about like he can’t figure out what to do with them. “You can do that, right?”
“Probably,” I reply, chuckling nervously as my head droops to the side. “Hopefully, I won’t turn the entire school into a bunch of amnesiacs.”
“That would be hard to explain,” Felix jokes with a wobbly smirk. “Weird gas leak?”
