Aadhya wasn’t asking me to make plans; she just wanted to know what I was going to do with my life. She waited for me to offer something, and when I didn’t she said, to drum it in, “I know what I’m doing. I don’t freaking need Magnus to make me offers. I’ve sold seventeen pieces of spell-tuned jewelry out of the leftover bits of sirenspider shell and argonet tooth you gave me. They’re not just junky senior stuff, they’re really good, people are going to keep them. I’ll get my own invites. I know what Liu’s doing. She’s going to do translations or raise familiars, and her family are going to have that enclave up in twenty years. Chloe’s going to be getting her DaVinci on and putting frescoes up all over New York, and she doesn’t even really need to do that. And I know that you’re not going to an enclave. That’s it. And not-enclaver is not a life.”
She wasn’t wrong, but I couldn’t say anything. My beautiful shining fantasy of the life of an itinerant golden-enclave builder withered in my mouth completely before her recitation of excellent and sensible and thoroughly practicable ideas. I couldn’t bring myself to describe it to Aadhya: I could just see her face going from doubtful to incredulous to horrified with worry, like listening to a friend earnestly telling you about their plans to climb a tall mountain, with dangerously insufficient preparation, and then going on to describe how, once they got to the top, they’d jump off and sprout wings and fly away to live in the clouds.
She sighed into my stretching silence. “I get you don’t like to talk about your mom, but I’ve heard about her and I live on another continent. People talk about her like she’s a saint. So in case it doesn’t go without saying, you don’t have to be your mom to be a decent human being. You don’t have to live on a commune and be a hermit.”
“I can’t anyway, they won’t have me,” I said, a bit hollowly.
“Based on what you’ve said about the place, I’m going to go out on a limb and say they’re justifiably afraid you’re going to set them all on fire. It’s okay for you to go live in New York with your weirdo boyfriend if you want to.”
“It’s not,” I said. “Aad, it’s not, because—they don’t want me. They want someone who’s going to cast death spells on their enemies. And if I gave them that, I wouldn’t be me anymore, so I might as well not go live in a bag of dicks. And you think that, too,” I added pointedly, “because otherwise you’d have told Magnus that you’d try and talk me into coming if he’d get you in the enclave.”
“Yeah, because that would work.”
“It might work to get you in,” I said. “He’d promise you an interview for sure.”
She gave a snort. “That’s not actually a stupid idea. Except I don’t want to talk you into New York, I’m just…” she trailed off. “El, it’s not just Magnus,” she said bluntly. “I’ve had a bunch of people asking me. Everyone knows about you now. And if you don’t go to some enclave—they’re going to wonder what you are planning to do.”
And I didn’t even need to lay my idiotic plans out before her to know without question that they’d believe in them even less than she would.
* * *
To further gladden my heart, our midterm grades were coming in that week. No matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something to worry about. If you’re going for valedictorian, anything less than perfect marks is a sentence of doom, and if you do get perfect marks, then you have to worry whether your courseload is heavy enough that your perfect marks will scale well against all the other kids going for valedictorian with their perfect marks. If you’re not going for valedictorian, then you have to spend the bare minimum of time on your actual coursework in order to maximize whatever you are actually working on to get you through graduation—whether that’s expanding your spell collection or creating tools or brewing potions, and of course building mana. If you get good marks, you wasted valuable time you should have spent on other things. But if your marks are too bad, you’ll get hit with remedial work or worse.
If you’re wondering how our marks get assigned when there are no teachers to evaluate anything, I’ve heard a million explanations. Loads of people, mostly enclavers, say with great assurance that the work gets shunted out of the Scholomance and sent to independent wizards hired for the marking. I don’t believe that for a second, because it would be expensive, and I’ve never met anyone who knows one of these wizards. Others claim the work gets graded through some sort of complicated equation based almost entirely on the amount of time you spend on it and your previous marks. If you want to really set off any valedictorian candidate, try telling them that it’s partly randomized.