I slept until well past midday, which I wasn’t expecting at all with how adrenaline-y I was. It was one of those things where you felt full of energy until you ran out of reasons to stay awake, then all of that exhaustion hit you at the same time and it was all you could do to get to bed before passing out. And another unexpected thing was I didn’t realise it was all a really weird dream or a bad acid trip or something after I woke up. (Acid was the hallucination one, right? Pretty sure it was.) As far as I could tell, all that really did all happen.

The next few days I was winding down and coming to grips with what happened. I still had a million questions about just about everything, which I hadn’t got around to asking before - there’d been no time during the first meeting, then after everyone came back to my house I ended up being too much of a mess to be curious. I’d cried a lot. The others stuck around to be there for me, even Charity eventually stopped petting the spider and said some nice things, but I asked them to leave after a while. I didn’t want to be a burden by making them stick around all night, and I knew they were too nice to leave if I didn’t tell them to.

At least Dad was happy. He’d come home just in time to see the others heading out, and even though I was in a bit of a state, he knew it was progress that I was talking to people again. I just wished I could tell him what we’d been talking about.

That was the one thing the others hammered home, even while I was all weepy. It took a lot of effort, and usually real trauma of some kind, to make the Veil stop working on someone, but once it did, it stopped working for good. If I tried to explain anything to Dad or anybody else, they’d almost one hundred percent decide that I was crazy or just getting really, really into a video game or something, but if I did somehow make something click, they’d be a target for monsters for the rest of their life. I wasn’t going to do that to anybody, even if I did hate keeping something this big from him.

So I spent a lot of time messaging Luke, Grace, Alex and Charity, like you’d expect. At first I just needed someone I could talk to about this magic stuff, to help work through it all and maybe make it feel a little less weird (that part probably wasn’t ever going to happen though), then after a while I started pestering them with questions about how it all worked, what it meant to have magic and what I was supposed to do about it. It was a lot to take in and I knew there was no way I’d remember it all, but I did my best.

It was kind of nice, in a way. Like I was back in class, studying and taking notes. (I’d read that writing down your notes helps you to remember things, so I made sure to do that even though there wasn’t going to be a test or anything, and highlighted the most important parts.) It’s not like I’d ever enjoyed studying, but it made life feel a little more normal and got me back into a routine. Nothing I did quite managed to get the monster out of my head, though. I kept seeing it in my dreams, and hearing its dying screams whenever it got too quiet.

Sometimes I heard Isobelle’s too. I was feeling better now, but I still wasn’t ready to go back to living my life.

I left the house again on Saturday. Grace had organised a fun, relaxing day out which was totally a “help Morgan feel better” day even if she never actually said it was. Meet up in the centre of town (the locals called it the city, but I knew what an actual city was and this wasn’t it), hang out for a bit, go see a movie, chat about it at Decadence for a while, then finish up with a trip to one of the art galleries, which it turned out Summerview had a lot more of than you’d expect. And she’d managed to arrange for the entire study group to attend, which meant no magic talk. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing or not, but in the end I decided to feel relieved about it and enjoy a normal day for the first time in weeks.

Grace and Alex showed up first, of course, so things were a little awkward while it was just the three of us waiting. I didn’t want to start talking about magic stuff when that wasn’t what today was about, but it was hard to talk about anything else, especially when Grace asked how I’d been and well, how do you respond to that? We were saved from the awkwardness after a couple minutes though, when I heard a voice shout out from behind me.

“SNEAK AT-TACK-LE HUG!”

I had more than enough time to turn around, spot Krystal and brace for impact before she reached me, not that I actually needed to. Krystal was the kind of person who took up a lot of space while somehow being very small, so I could probably have dragged her around town just by walking while she clung on to my waist. I put an arm around her in return, which was easier said than done. She wore a hoodie that was at least two sizes too big for her - I’d never seen her without it, even during summer - and it was so baggy that it was tricky to figure out which parts of the silhouette wrapped around me were Krystal and which parts were sleeves flapping around.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she agreed.

I looked around for Gavin, spotted him on the other side of the road, and waved. The two usually arrived to things at around the same time, being roommates and all. And they looked like a pair, too, in a way. Gavin was a lot taller, but not much wider at all, and he had his own signature item of clothing that he always wore, a rose pink beanie that contrasted his black hair and usually black t-shirts in a nice way. He had scruffy bits of facial hair that made it look like he was always a couple days overdue for a shave, she had kinda scruffy head hair? That last part was a bit of a stretch, I guess. They just had this similar vibe.

Krystal had disentangled herself from me by the time he made it across the road, since this was one of the parts of Summerview where you had to actually wait for traffic. Now they were here, I wasn’t sure what to say to them, honestly. I wanted to have my normal day and talk about normal stuff, but it’s hard to think of a normal thing to say when you’re actively trying to do it. Kinda like not thinking about pink elephants, but in reverse. Luckily I found something to talk about once Gavin was close enough for me to read his shirt. He had a pretty consistent rotation of band t-shirts that he wore, and I hadn’t seen this one before.

“So, Flugelhorn huh? Is that a new one?”

“Flügélhörn,” he corrected.

“Flugêlhõrn?”

“Flü - eh, close enough. They’re this sick neoclassical metal slash bardcore group, they do a lot of brass and shredding lutes. My friend got me into them about a month ago, but the shirt only just arrived. You better get used to it, cause I’m not taking it off for a month at least.”

“You think he’s joking, but it’s true,” Krystal said. “Even in the shower.”

I’d hung around Gavin long enough to mostly understand what those music words meant, or at least to think I understood them. “They sound pretty cool. You should send me some of their stuff!”

Krystal gasped. “Nooooooo! Don’t encourage him! Do you have any idea what you’ve just signed yourself up for?”

“Too late!” Gavin threw his head back and laughed like a cartoon villain. “You will drown in an ocean of scorching lute solos! These riffs will be stuck in your head until the day you die, and there is nothing you can do about it!”

“Please, no, have mercy!”, I begged him. Or, well, I tried to beg, but then I started to chuckle a little and that ruined the effect.

“There is no mercy. There is only the Flügélhörn! Oooh and they’re a local group, so after I’ve made you listen to all their stuff I can make you come to one of their shows. They said they’re doing a tour later this year, but they haven’t released the dates yet and it is killing me.” He clutched at his heart and doubled over in agony. “I’ve never been this obsessed with a band before. I think this is true love.”

Krystal laughed. “Yeah his headphones have been glued to his ears for the whole month. He was jamming all the way through those kids attacking our building, didn’t even hear the alarm going off.”

I felt my whole body go tense. “Uh. What?”

Gavin’s eyes lit up. “Oh man, you haven’t heard? Some punks broke into our building, pulled the fire alarm and started smashing up the place. Crazy shit, right?”

“Oh. That’s so weird. Did they find out who?”

“Nah, they got out pretty quick. And the power kept going out, so we wouldn’t have seen them anyway.”

“Wow. I missed out on a lot, huh?”

The power kept going out? That didn’t make any sense, it was day when it happened. Why would you need power to see people? Then something clicked. Charity had been using her illusions to direct us around the building with arrows, but she’d also been making sure nobody saw anything by blacking out hallways and stuff whenever someone might get a peek. Had people really interpreted that as the lights going out? That was creepy.

I got a bit lost in thought over that for a while. I eventually managed to get myself back into the moment and start focusing on having a nice day, but I’d faded into the background a little by then. Luke and Charity had arrived, and the conversation had somehow moved on to Gavin and Luke arguing about whether the final episode of some show they both watched had been good or not. Or, well, Gavin was arguing while Luke kept apologising for disagreeing with him. It sounded like a friendly disagreegument, at least.

We reached the cinema pretty soon after that, and a few crazy overpriced snacks later we were all seated in a row, hushing up as the trailers started. The movie was pretty good, and my ice cream wasn’t too bad either. It was a feel-good romcom kind of movie, where a man and woman who don’t like each other are forced by wacky circumstances to go on a road trip across the country together, they start out fighting and playing mean (but funny) pranks on each other, but then they start opening up and seeing each other’s vulnerabilities, and they fall in love at the end. It was called Drive Me Crazy, which haha, pun.

Then came the part of the day I was really looking forward to. Decadence was probably the best restaurant I’d ever been to that didn’t have any three-digit prices on the menu, and it was just across the road from the cinema. The theme of the restaurant was chocolate, and every single item on the menu had some in it, but it wasn’t just sweets. You could come in just for dessert and have a good time, and lots of people did, but their desserts were actually the least interesting things they served because they were mostly just, well, chocolate. Pretty good chocolate, much better than the junk you’d buy at a supermarket or something, but not exciting. The really amazing parts that kept me coming back were what they did with the savoury options, the way they incorporated chocolatey flavours into totally unexpected dishes so that it made them super interesting and delicious instead of just being weird.

I only ended up ordering one course, since we were just there for lunch and I’d already spent way too much on my movie ice cream, but it was just as good as I’d been hoping. Chilli beef noodles with just the right amount of chocolate incorporated into the broth, it added complexity and a bit of sweetness that perfectly balanced with the spicy and umami. And it was a lot of spicy, too. My mouth was sizzling as I slurped my noodles and listened to the post-movie breakdown.

“The trope’s a fundamental a part of the genre, and it might be a bit, you know, problematic sometimes, but the premise of the film doesn’t work very well without it,” Luke was saying. “You’re right that it doesn’t make sense from a -”

“It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s romantic!”, Krystal interrupted.

“Romantic?”, Charity replied. “They were in that car for four days, tops. That’s not romantic, it’s psychotic. If your film has people go from bitter enemies to marriage proposals in four days, it is my solemn duty to mock it. And if any of you decide to marry someone after four days, I will show up at your wedding and mock you just as mercilessly.”

“It’s not about how many days, it’s about the journey. It’s a metaphor or whatever. Even people who seem like jerks have their own struggles, and if you try to understand them you can find out that they’re not so bad deep down, and just because that would take more than one road trip in real life doesn’t mean the idea is wrong. Or maybe I’m just overthinking a dumb comedy movie, but still!”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re overthinking it,” Luke said. “It’s a whole death of the author thing. If you can find something good in it, then it was good and worth watching. And I think that’s a really good moral to take away.”

“Plus, the guy was hot,” Alex said.

“Stupid hot,” Krystal agreed with a grin.

“He might’ve even been in my league.” Gavin flexed both arms for emphasis, bending his head over to kiss one of his, um, delts? Or pecs? Whichever one the big bulgy upper arm muscle is. Not that it was really that bulgy on him, he had something going on there but he didn’t have the kind of figure that people swooned over.

After a few seconds of everyone staring at him, he drooped and started making big sad puppy dog eyes instead. Krystal reached up to give him a comforting pat on the head.

“Hey, I’m not saying they shouldn’t bang,” Charity said, as though nothing had just happened. “Two hours of that would’ve been worth my fifteen bucks. But hate sex is just as valid as bland, missionary position love sex, so there’s no reason they had to get married in the end.”

I spilled a bit of broth on my shirt as I slurped up my noodles too fast. “Charity, public place?” I looked around nervously at the other diners. I didn’t see anybody giving us weird looks, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening.

“Right, sorry. Very selfish of me to not share my valuable insights with everyone else.” Charity raised her voice. “I SAID, HATE SE -”

Alex put a hand over her mouth just in time, so the rest of the sentence was just grunts.

Grace nodded approvingly. “Thank you. Now, a question for those of you who haven’t forfeited your speaking privileges: I’ve been eyeing one of those dessert pizzas, but I couldn’t possibly eat it all by myself. Would anyone be interested in having a slice or two?”

There was a chorus of yesses from everyone who could talk, and an extremely long and even more extremely disgruntled noise from Charity, who still had Alex’s hand clamped over her mouth. I couldn’t help it, I started giggling. It was a long time before I stopped.