Magick Mirror Read online

  One side of Anders’ mouth quirked into a smile. “I always knew you were a man of adventure, Ben. You’re destined for great things.”

  A grin lit Ben’s face. “Right on!”

  Anders shifted the crystal mirror so that he could see Lucy through it—and gasped when a boil-faced witch glared back at him. Anders fumbled the geode and heard it thunk to the floor of the bus.

  Ben guffawed and covered his mouth. Lucy’s nose scrunched up. She scowled at Anders as she stood from her seat. “Screw you, Dumbledork! You’re a real jerk.”

  She climbed out of the seat over Ben.

  “Dude,” Ben whispered. “That was hilarious.”

  “Heh. Yeah?” Anders managed to reply. His t-shirt clung to his sweaty back. He bent under the seat, retrieved the mirror, and stuffed it back into his pack.

  For the rest of the ride, Anders sat in silence and stared into space while his mind raced to decipher the mirror’s meaning. In a way, it made a lot of sense. The mirror’s power was insight, and the images it had shown him had been insightful enough. Ben really did have a great sense of adventure even if he could be easily distracted. Anders had known it since the moment they met in elementary school and bonded over their love for video games and sci-fi movies. Whereas Lucy and Anders had never gotten along. Even now, five or six rows ahead Anders could see her whispering venomous thoughts to her friends, no doubt plotting a dubious revenge against his insensitivity.

  Anders turned around to explain his theory to Ben, but he had moved to the back of the bus to play cards out of the bus driver’s line of sight.

  By the time they pulled into the school parking lot, Anders had calmed himself down enough to play it cool as he walked into the school building. He hit the bathroom first to wash his face, since he had neglected to do so this morning. He straightened his rumpled clothes and wet his hair where it stuck out at a weird angle. Anders decided to stash the crystal mirror in his locker and figure out what to do with it when he got home.

  As he turned down the hall to his locker, he spotted Nadine, wearing a pleated blue skirt. Her hair was divided into twin golden ponytails. His body’s response to her short, body-hugging Sailor Moon costume made him jerk back around to hide both his groin and his red face. He cursed under his breath.

  A minute later, he turned back into the hall and hurried to his locker. He caught a look of Nadine in his peripheral vision and his heart clenched in his chest.

  He pretended to busy himself in his locker while she opened hers a few feet away to stash a binder. She closed the metal door and hurried away.

  Unable to resist, Anders held the crystal mirror out and looked at Nadine’s retreating back. A delicate golden tiara on her head sparkled under the fluorescent lights.

  Boyd Bohannon stepped out of a side hall and slid up next to Nadine. Boyd was a stereotypical jock, and today he wore a Peyton Manning jersey for his “costume,” with a gym towel around his neck. He had birds for brains, of course, but all the girls swooned over him. It drove Anders crazy.

  He felt his lips twist into a sneer as he anticipated what came next. He shifted the mirror to focus on Boyd.

  Unbelievable. Instead of being the evil wizard/dragon who had stolen the princess, as Anders suspected, through-the-glass Boyd looked like a doctor in a white lab coat, with the gym towel around his neck appearing as a stethoscope.

  “Seriously?” Anders muttered.

  His guts tangled up like a Gregorian knot. Somehow, it was easier to think of losing Nadine to Boyd when he was just a dumb jock. But Boyd as a good guy? A doctor? The idea was unbearable.

  Anders took a step forward to chase after Nadine. He wanted to pull her aside and tell her everything he’d been too embarrassed to say to her before.

  But—as before—he failed to summon the courage. Instead, he sighed and turned back to his locker with the taste of vinegar on his tongue. As he opened his backpack, the mists swirled again: his sprite took a punch to the jaw and stumbled. A heart dropped off his life gauge and he was left with three.

  4

  IRL GAME

  He changed his mind and decided to keep the crystal mirror in his backpack. Anders zoned out through his next two periods while his mind turned over this new puzzle.

  He began to think of his dilemma as the IRL (in real life) game. The most frustrating thing was that there were no longer instructions in the crystal. Just the three hearts he had remaining and, if he looked into its surface while his thoughts were turned inwards, himself as a scrawny 16-bit sprite.

  During third period he grew more bold. Wasn’t everyone dressed up for Halloween? He took the mirror out of his backpack. For the rest of the day, Anders walked the halls and sat in class with the mirror in plain sight without anyone looking at him sideways. He even managed to sneak a few glimpses of his teachers and classmates through it.

  What surprised him most was that almost no one appeared the same way they presented themselves in person. One shy girl who had a nervous habit of chewing on the ends of her hair and who had not worn a costume, perhaps out of shyness, was decked out as a glamorous singer with pink punk rock bangs. Meanwhile, his stressed-out computer science teacher, Mr. Roy, who had worn a flannel shirt to match his glue-on lumberjack beard, appeared through the glass as a smooth-flying pilot with a scarf around his neck and aviator goggles pressed to his face.

  The lunch bell rang and students rushed out to grab the good tables. Eager to test the mirror’s magic on a less intimidating target than Nadine, Anders slowly packed his things and waited until the rest of class had filtered into the hall before he rose from his seat.

  “Mr. Roy?”

  “What’s up, Anders? Did you have trouble with the lab?”

  “No, that was actually pretty easy. I…ah…wanted to ask you about something else actually.” He paused, unsure how to phrase it without seeming like he was prying. He settled on a version of the same question adults had been asking him for years: “What did you want to be when you grew up? You know, when you were my age?“

  Mr. Roy scratched the grey hairs at his temple. “Oh, boy. No one has asked me that in a long time.”

  “I’m just curious.”

  “I don’t mind telling you: I wanted to be a pilot.”

  “Why aren’t you?” Anders blurted. “I mean, you’d be a great pilot. Goggles on, wind blowing in your face. If that’s what you really wanted to do, why didn’t you?”

  Mr. Roy’s lips parted and closed again. Reluctantly, he nodded. “Pretty dated description of a pilot. Well, life doesn’t always turn out how you expect.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  Mr Roy waited patiently.

  “Uh, that’s it, thanks.”

  Mr. Roy smiled sadly. “Sure thing.”

  As he walked out of the classroom, Anders looked down at the mirror. Mist swirled and formed the letters: BONUS! +200. The two hundred points moved to a new counter in the top right of the crystal next to a coin icon. Progress. Anders smiled and quickened his pace to the cafeteria.

  After standing in line for lunch, he slid into a bench next to Ben, who was deep in a heated discussion with Marcus and Geoff about The Matrix. Anders was waiting impatiently for a break in the conversation when Nadine and her friends sat next to them at the long table.

  Anders glanced around. The cafeteria was crowded. Boyd squeezed into the bench next to Nadine.

  Anders pushed two french fries around his tray with a fork while he tried not to pay attention to Nadine and Boyd. After an anecdote about freshman hazing rituals among the football team, at which Nadine and her friends giggled uncomfortably, Boyd picked up a tan arm and rested his wrist on Nadine’s shoulder. Anders clenched the plastic fork in his hand so hard it broke in half. The loud snap caused everyone to look at him.

  Nadine shrugged out of Boyd’s embrace.

  Boyd turned on Anders. “What’s your deal, twerp? You got a problem?”

  “Boyd, don’t,” said Nadine.

  Riled
up by the very fact that Nadine would try to rescue him from Boyd’s imbecilic wrath, Anders responded hotly, “You’re like a lodestone for intolerance. Does it make you feel like a man to fill freshman lockers with shaving cream, or do you just get really excited sniffing their jockstraps?”

  “You little twerp!” Boyd lunged across the table. Anders dodged out of Boyd’s exceptional reach and skipped back from the table.

  “Stop it, both of you!” Nadine cried. Boyd pushed himself to his feet and stood there, his shoulders heaving.

  Anders caught Nadine’s eyes for a brief moment. She scowled at him and stormed out of the cafeteria. Boyd glared at Anders before following.

  Anders took his seat again and gazed down at the crystal. He swore.

  His heart count had been reduced to two.

  5

  NO CHEATING

  Ben and Anders were early to Mrs. Werner’s English class. They took their seats and spoke in whispers as their classmates drifted in.

  “Damn, A, you’ve got balls of steel today,” Ben said. “You’re lucky Boyd is too thick to get into Honors classes or we’d both be ground beef.”

  “You’d stick up for me against him?”

  “You know I would.“

  “Thanks, man. But it’s not that I’ve got balls of steel, it’s that this crystal mirror is freaking me out. Everything I’ve seen in it is true.”

  Ben’s easy-going smile faltered. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve gotta see it to believe it.” Anders handed the mirror to Ben. “Look through it at anyone in this room and tell me what you see.”

  Ben aimed the crystal at Mrs. Werner. “I see … a boring lecture about Odysseus coming our way!”

  Mrs. Werner glared at Ben. He shifted so he could see Anders’ face instead.

  “Do you see it?” Anders asked.

  “See what? I just see you in that goofy wizard hat.”

  Anders groaned. “Give it to me,” he said. He took the mirror back, and when he gazed into it, the mist had formed new words, flashing red: NO CHEATING.

  “Are you messing with me?”

  The little hairs on the back of his neck stood on end.

  “Nevermind.” When he fell silent, Ben shrugged and turned away.

  The admonishment seemed to defy the standard rules of RPGs. All reluctant heroes were allowed to gather their party to help them in their quest. If anyone fit the role of sidekick, it was Ben. How was asking his best friend’s advice considered cheating?

  Then Anders remembered: once he had been tasked with acquiring the crystal mirror within the game, the NPCs had become reticent and quit giving his character hints and suggestions. Like the hero of Magick Mirror, Anders was left to wrestle with this challenge on his own.

  He brooded over his dilemma for the rest of English class. The questions brought on by the implied game rules he’d learned so far seemed endless. What would happen to Nadine if he lost all his hearts? How was he supposed to find the dragon’s lair and rescue her? And if Boyd was not the evil wizard/dragon, then who was?

  One thought bothered him most of all: If he lost all of his hearts, what would happen between he and Nadine? Would it mean he had finally blown it for good?

  He spent English class sneaking glances at as many of his peers as possible, looking for any sign of the dragon or its hideout. He found neither, and when he walked into last period, Ms. Bozeman told him to “put the toy away.” He dropped it into his backpack with disgust.

  Ms. Bozeman taught Algebra II, and she was good at it. Because of her skill as a teacher, and the way she refused to take crap or excuses from any of her students, it was one of the few classes Anders actually enjoyed attending.

  Ms. Bozeman was dressed as a pirate wench, albeit a classy one. A striped bandana tied down her greying brown hair, and a leather vest was laced up the front of her white blouse. On her feet, however, were black tennis shoes. Sensible as always.

  When she turned to the blackboard, Anders snuck a glance at Ms. Bozeman through the mirror and was delighted to see that she looked like a hippie version of her non-Halloween self. Her clothes were tie-dyed and her horned glasses groovier, but her shirt was still dusted with chalk around the stomach and, of course, she wore tie-dyed sneakers on her feet. Unlike almost everyone he’d seen through the mirror, Ms. Bozeman was exactly what she meant to be. She had found her true self.

  Anders dropped the mirror into his backpack when he caught Nadine watching him from across the room. This was the one class they shared. He spent the rest of the period intensely focused on the blackboard and his notepad, refusing to look in her direction.

  He made it to the end of the school day without losing any more hearts. When the bell rang, he even managed to be the first one out the door.

  Outside in the parking lot, Anders let his mind wander. What could be done to reverse the effects of the game? Take out the cartridge? Reset the console? He was willing to try anything. Maybe it would work.

  He tapped his toe until someone tapped his shoulder. Turning, his stomach dropped into his feet. He looked straight into Nadine’s big amber eyes.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Uh,” he said. “Hi.” Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  “Are you okay? You’re acting weird.”

  “No, it’s…I’m fine, totally fine, yeah. How are you?”

  “Really? Can you just be honest with me for once, Anders?”

  He felt his face flush with shame. The crystal began to slip out of his sweaty fingers. He shifted it to his arm and held it like a heavy tome in the crook of his elbow.

  “Boyd is a douchebag.” The words slipped out before he could stop them. “He doesn’t deserve you.”

  “You don’t know him. He’s a nice guy.”

  “He’s only nice to you because you’re pretty.”

  “At least he says something.”

  Anders stared at his feet.

  “That’s it?” she asked. Anders loved the way her sharp chin wrinkled when she was concerned about something, the way she puckered her lips, to which just the right amount of lip gloss had been artfully applied. These reminders wrenched at his heart. They forced his thoughts back to a month ago, when her attitude toward him had been different, when the temperature of the air between them had been less frosty.

  For once, he said what he was really thinking: “You want to know the truth? The truth is that I want you back.”

  Nadine’s brow scrunched and she shook her head. “First you don’t say anything…and then we don’t talk for weeks, and now you want to get back together? Are you serious?”

  “Yes! It’s the only thing that makes sense. We have to get back together.”

  “Anders…I don’t…I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “Nadine! Wait!”

  She turned and ran to the school building, pushing through a doorway to the cafeteria.

  Anders held the mirror at arm’s length. He felt numb and slightly nauseated. Another heart disappeared. Though he couldn’t find the dragon in the crystal, Anders knew that the beast had stolen Nadine from him again.

  6

  UNBREAKABLE MIRROR, BREAKABLE HEART

  Anders thundered down the basement steps and fell to his knees in front of the Super Nintendo. The Magick Mirror cartridge was inserted in the console exactly as he’d left it.

  He turned on the TV and pushed the purple power switch forward.

  Nothing happened.

  Anders removed the cartridge and blew the dust out of it, clearing the circuitry of debris. He shoved the cartridge back into the console and shifted the power button forward.

  A brief flash brightened the television screen, and then nothing.

  Clenching his jaw, he rummaged for the mirror in his pack and set it on the floor. The surface flashed red mist-letters at him when he tried to turn the console on a third time. NOT ALLOWED.

  He pumped the reset button instead. NICE TRY, the mirror read.

  “Aw, c’mon,
are you kidding me?” He cursed, tore the rare cartridge from the console, and threw it against the brick wall. It bounced to the thin carpet.

  Anders smashed the cartridge into the floor with the crystal mirror. Pieces of plastic and circuit board hopped and scattered with each blow. When the cartridge had been pulped sufficiently to make smashing it no longer satisfying, Anders lifted the console over his head—the Super Nintendo Entertainment System which had gifted him with his earliest remembered sense of wonder and thousands of hours of entertainment—and hurled it against the wall over and over and over, chest heaving, eyes flooding with tears of rage.

  When the console had been annihilated, Anders lifted the crystal mirror with a grim expression and pitched that, too, against the brick wall. It bounced off without a dent.

  Breathing heavily, he brought the crystal upstairs to the garage. He dropped it in the middle of the smooth cement floor and retrieved his father’s sledgehammer.

  He squared his legs like his father had taught him, pulled the hammer back over his head, and brought it down with all his might. The hammer clanged like a great bell. His hands tingled with the aftershock that traveled down the handle.

  As if to mock him, the surface of the crystal mirror wobbled with the impact, but remained unblemished.

  He pulled the hammer up, gritted his teeth, and brought it down again. And again. And again. His hands shook from the exertion. Eventually, his shoulder muscles reached their limit. The sledgehammer slipped to the floor, and Anders collapsed onto the cold cement. He covered his head with his arms and lay there, completely still except for his labored breathing.

  Normally, he treasured this gap of time between school and when his parents got home from work. Without a reset button for his life, and no way to beat the insane game he had been tricked into, his freedom felt like a sham. He was stuck in this blasted game, and not even a sledgehammer could bust him out.

  Anders wiped the sweat from his brow. One thing was certain: there was no reset button. No going back. He had to see the game through to its end. Even if he lost.