Chapter 5 — Rules of the Game

There were way too many kids at Willford Jenkins Middle School.

According to Quinn, the school had eleven hundred students total, and about three hundred of those were eighth graders. Hearing those numbers, Natalie had imagined a future where she could just blend into the background. She would just pass through school without really being noticed. Her master plan was all about endurance. She'd stick it out just long enough until they didn't need to hide anymore. She made it her goal to be remembered by as few people as possible.

She barely lasted a week.

What Natalie didn't realize, and what Quinn hadn't thought to tell her, was that Jenkins didn't get new students very often. Everyone in the eighth grade had moved up together year by year, and many of them had known each other from elementary school or even earlier. Natalie was one of only two new students in their whole grade—and that made her an instant celebrity.

Quinn was practically shoved aside as the popular girls adopted her into their circle. After the tenth introduction, Natalie didn't even try to remember them anymore. She let herself be lead through a whirlwind of names and faces, blandly greeting them with a smile while nervously fidgeting with gemstones in her pocket.

The girls quickly came to understand just how socially ill-equipped Natalie was. Even back home, Natalie never really used any sort of social media, and she soon realized that more than half of the conversation between these girls was taking place online and well beyond earshot. They made an honest effort to try and educate the new girl on the latest gossip, the most important shows and music and movies to watch, who was cool and who was lame—but Natalie just couldn't bring herself to care.

Who cares about gossip and drama when I can do magic? There's more important stuff out there.

She nodded through their conversations and tried to be friendly, but Natalie just had so much else on her mind constantly that they could tell she wasn't even good to be a bit player in their little troupe. After only two weeks, Blake Sinclair—the pretty girl around whom the rest circled like starving cats—decided that the messy-haired, tomboyish new girl with the freakish strength and the weird habit of talking to herself was probably best left alone. Natalie was never told to leave, but when she got the cold shoulder from one after the other, she got the hint pretty quickly.

She didn't mind. At the very least, they'd shown her just how observant a lot of the kids were. Lily, Kendra, and all the others had stressed to her not to use magic while she was at school, but Natalie couldn't help it. A lot of the time it just came totally natural to her, like when she'd broken the pencil in front of Quinn, or when she made an eraser skip across the desk rather than reaching out to grab it. She sat in the back of most of her classes, since her new last name just happened to alphabetize at the right spot before it looped back around to the front, so she was lucky enough that most people didn't notice her murmuring spells without meaning to.

The riskiest thing she'd done was a brief conversation she'd held with a friendly tabby cat prowling near the door to the West Hall. It was looking for food, so she gave it a bit of tuna from the lunch Lily had made that day. From a distance she doubted anyone would have noticed anything strange, but if they'd heard her speaking to it? How could she explain a language she didn't even understand herself?

Natalie never really understood how she was doing it, unlike the other spells she'd mastered. She'd learned it from that page she'd found, back before it was torn to bits and burned up with all the others in the first big fight—the night she'd met Rachel. It took a combination of the spellcasting language—that weird mix of clicks and words that weren't words—and a kind of sing-song talking, like how some adults talked to little kids. When she did that, she reached out mentally to the animal and could get an idea of how they felt, and what they might say if they could understand her. They didn't use words like people did, but she could still hear them.

The animals made way better friends than those popular girls did, at least for a little while. At the Laushire house she had Percy, her link back to the others in Rallsburg, and at the school she had the tabby cat, the hamsters in the science lab, and the pet snake that Mr. Darwin kept in his room. Natalie tried to make friends with them all, but most of them just didn't respond to her very well. She didn't know if she was doing something wrong or if they just weren't as smart as Gwen and Percy. Either way, she started to feel it settling in.

Natalie was lonely.

She felt so stupid. Why would she be lonely? Nothing had changed, had it? Even back in Rallsburg, she hadn't really hung out with anyone very much. She spent most of her time online, watching TV or playing games. When she did go out to play, it was just her dad or Jenny, or sometimes with the college kids when they came out into the town—as long as her dad didn't notice. Those were special occasions. They'd run a regular game of capture the flag in the middle of town, and Jenny and Natalie would get put on opposite teams.

Natalie prided herself on being able to slip through the cracks they couldn't follow, but Jenny was faster than her. They often ended up chasing each other while everyone else cheered them on, and games would usually be decided by which of them managed to sneak by the other with the flag. Natalie knew she was being treated like a kind of mascot for the college students, but she didn't mind. She liked being part of the team and bringing home the win for them, even if she didn't know most of their names.

Here at Jenkins, Natalie didn't have a team anymore. She found herself eating lunch alone again every day. Sometimes in the cafeteria, but more often retreating out into the South Hall bathroom where she knew no one from her grade would go. She could feel their stolen glances on her back, almost like she'd betrayed them by not being cool or social enough to join their clique.

She tried to convince herself she didn't mind. Natalie was getting the hang of going to school every day—friends would just make that so much harder. She woke up every morning in the Laushire house, said good morning to whichever of the two had the day off, cleaned up and got ready, took her lunch and stepped out the door to emerge behind the convenience store. She walked to school from the bus stop alone, went to each class alone, ate lunch alone, and walked home alone when the bell released her. She paid as much attention as she could stand, but her mind wandered easily and she spent half of class staring out windows thinking about magic, or about what a bird flying by might be thinking, or just wishing she could be done with the whole charade and on the hunt with Gwen and Rachel.

Still, loneliness kept prodding her, finally pushing her to make a decision as the leaves changed and September rolled into October. Natalie wanted to talk to someone, but she couldn't bring herself to. She was too embarrassed to try and make friends now, after she'd actively rejected so many of them in the first month of school. Especially Quinn, who she felt like she'd totally abandoned after he'd been so kind and helpful the first couple days. Now whenever she saw him, he had his own small clique that he stuck to without fail. It was only four people, but there was no way she could ever approach him after she'd left him behind.

Natalie finally gave in one day while sitting on the toilet at lunch with her legs up, keeping totally silent so that the other girl in the bathroom wouldn't know she was there. She dropped the sandwich Lily had made back into her bag, the exact same one she'd had every day since her first. The warnings of staying unnoticed and out of sight echoed in her mind, but she couldn't stand it anymore. She resolved to find a friend, anyone she could talk to.

Instead, they found her.