Page 47 of Witchlore
Father is unhappy. He has aged so much since I came back from Ypres. Mother comes to the hospital to care for me, but I do not know if I will ever walk the same way again. He wants me to promise that I will shift into a female form and not go back to the front. I don’t know how to explain that I have friends who are dying there, left to rot in the fields of Belgium and France. I don’t know how to explain that while it feels abhorrent to turn my back on them, there is nothing I want to do more. When I dream, I relive the moment after the explosion, the rain of mud, entombing me under the earth. I never want to go back there and yet, out there is the only place where I feel like I make sense anymore.
I feel dizzy as I look at the shapeshifter’s words, like I might be about to have a panic attack, but maybe that’s because I can still taste the chloroform they used to put me to sleep in the hospital for my wounded leg. Except none of it was me, they’re not my memories, so what are they doing in my head? There are no names or places in the diary, but could it be that the shifter in the book really did end up at a hospital here in St. Annes? Though… why would I be having visions of their memories, and only when I shift? None of it makes sense.
Suddenly, I wish Elizabeth was here. She was the first person I could talk to about being a shifter. I never told her the stuff I told Bastian, the stuff he called dark, but just being able to trustsomeone enough to admit it was complicated was very meaningful. I’d never had anyone in whom I could confide how hard it was to live in my body, without them throwing it back in my face. She was always kind, always sympathetic. I know she would listen if I told her about these dreams or visions, the way my mind is full of memories that aren’t mine. She might even have an idea of why it’s happening, or at least, she’d want to find out. I smile a little to myself as I imagine her diving headfirst into the library. She loved a magical mystery. That’s what took us to the cave, after all, her desperation to help me do magic. I feel a swell of familiar guilt all over again.Does it matter why it’s happening?I ask myself angrily.Isn’t it all worth it if I get her back?
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
“Hey, I wanted to ask you something.” Bastian sits back down beside me, his hand in a big bag of almonds and putting a packet of Oreos between us. Despite still feeling gross from the shift, I rip the packet open and go to town on the Oreos. With my mouth full of chocolate, I sigh. It helps a bit.
“Okay,” I say through crumbs.
“This thing with you and Carl,” he says.
“Such a wanker.” I roll my eyes while pulling apart an Oreo to lick out the middle.
“That’s… so nasty.” Bastian stares at me with reluctant fascination. “Why don’t you just eat it?”
“I like it this way.” I shrug. “What do you want to ask about Carl? If you want to know what terrible thing made him such a bully, I don’t know, I think he probably came out of the womb twisted.”
“What’s the deal with the two of you?” Bastian frowns. “He seems to really hate you and it’s not that he’s a homophobe—”
“No, he is definitely not a homophobe,” I mutter. Bastian looks at me sharply and I know I’ve said the wrong thing. He’s frowning. He’s working it out. I stuff a biscuit in my mouth.
“Did he… try something with you?” Bastian asks. I’d always thought that if someone asked me about this, they’d sound incredulous, they’d be mocking, they’d instantly dismiss the notion that someone like Carl Lord would try to hit on me and I wouldn’t want it. Bastian doesn’t sound like that. He sounds concerned. When I look at his face, it’s intent, he’s concentrating on me very carefully. I just know that he’s not going to judge me. I brush oily chocolate residue off my lips and nod.
“We were friends at the beginning of college. He… well, he kept trying to kiss me.”
“What?” Bastian’s voice is dangerous suddenly.
“It wasn’t that bad,” I say hastily. “It was just… like, he would find a way for us to be alone and then he would, you know, push me against walls and stuff.…”
My tongue feels heavy. I’ve never put so many words to this. With Elizabeth, I gave her a pretty standard explanation and her response was to roll her eyes and say, “Ugh, yeah, he’s so vile!” I felt justified but also, perhaps, a little dismissed. Maybe I should have explained, like I’m doing now.
“That sounds really bad,” Bastian says, clenching his fists on his blanket. “Did you tell anyone? Get him to stop?”
“No.” I feel the curdling edges of rebuke against myself and urge myself to explain why. “He would always make it a joke. He made me feel like I had misread the situation and he didn’t want me so much after all. It was a special kind of hell, being his friend, but I’d never had a proper friend before so I didn’t know.”
“Yeah.” Bastian’s voice is short, like he’s holding all his anger back. “That is not what friends do.”
“I got that when I shifted into a female form in the spring of first year. Suddenly, he didn’t want to know me, and that’swhen the teasing started, the jokes about me being a shifter, all of that.”
I don’t want to use the word “bullying,” but it is the only accurate one. Although it’s so embarrassing to be bullied at my age. Surely all of this was supposed to be left behind with secondary school? Was I just an idiot for hoping that the one upside of being homeschooled was that I skipped that particular ritual humiliation?
“When I was in a female form, he completely lost interest, thank god,” I say with a wry smirk. “Carl doesn’t like boobs.”
“This is why he called you—”
“A cocktease? Yeah,” I admit, feeling revulsion inside me. Toward him but also, a little bit, toward myself. “I would always push him off or squirm away and he’d say I was playing hard to get and then when I shifted—”
“He thought you’d cockblocked him?” Bastian sounds incredulous. “How is this guy still allowed at college?”
“I didn’t tell anyone, except Elizabeth,” I say painfully, wondering if it’s my fault. “And he’s a bully. People expect him to be a dick to me, especially because I’m a shifter.”
“Surely they don’t expect him to sexually harass you.” Bastian scowls. Those words give me pause.Is that what happened?I wonder. There’s a little voice inside of me that answers firmly,Yes, it is.
“Witches think shifters are naturally duplicitous,” I say, thinking back to my parents, how they hid me from the world. It wasn’t just because they were ashamed of me, they didn’t trust the world to treat me fairly. “He never bullies me about anything but being a shapeshifter. He plays into everyone’s prejudice and they don’t even realize it’s about something else. Besides, he’s not some rapey incel guy. He’s gay. They don’t want to believe that about him.”
“I believe you,” Bastian says fiercely. “Just because he’s gay doesn’t mean he can’t also be a creep.”
