It was worth waiting for them, but by the time I finished, the first early warning chimes were going off delicately, ding dong death by fire coming, to remind anyone who’d missed it that the cleansing was about to get under way. I made a dash to the girls’ to get my teeth brushed and my face washed, so I wouldn’t be grotty for hours, and stopped short in the doorway aghast: Liesel was in there doing her makeup.
The use of cosmetic in here is roughly as high as it was in my first year of primary school. However low the odds that you make a mistake when mixing up your lipstick in the alchemy lab and melt half your face off, they’re still too high for most people. If you’re good enough to be sure you won’t, you’re good enough to get an alliance in a more reliable way. Dating doesn’t guarantee you an alliance any more than friendship does. But nevertheless here Liesel was, putting shiny pink lip gloss on her valedictorian mouth and dabbing a bit of it as color onto her cheeks. She’d already taken her hair out of the tight short plaits she always wore and had shaken the blond waves over her shoulders. She’d put on a crisp white blouse, actually ironed, and she’d unbuttoned it just far enough to leave a decent bit of cleavage showing, with a gold pendant hung round her neck. She would have looked nice enough for a date outside; in here, by comparison with our usual state, she might as well have stepped off the cover of Vogue to dazzle ordinary mortals.
I have to confess, I reacted atrociously. “Not Tebow,” I blurted, from the door.
Her shiny lips pressed into a thin line. “Lake seems quite busy,” she said, through her teeth, and I couldn’t even say anything to that under the circumstances; she had every right to be as angry with me as she was. Maybe she wanted to shag Magnus, who was after all heading for six feet and would himself have not looked out of place in—well, an Argos catalog, or at least a pound-shop flyer.
Yes, maybe, but my imagination has limits and that’s beyond them. So I didn’t even leave bad enough alone; I said, “Look, it’s no business of mine,” which coming out of my own mouth should have been a strong hint to me to stop there, but instead I went on, “but you should know, they’ve already offered me a guarantee.”
In my defense, that piece of information probably did matter a great deal to her. Even if Magnus Tebow was her ideal of manhood and charisma, she’d made bleeding valedictorian with three and a half years of brutal unrelenting work, and she couldn’t have wanted to throw that away on someone who couldn’t even offer her a guaranteed spot in an enclave. New York had too many eager applicants, most of them proven wizards who’d left school years ago and done significant work; there wasn’t any way they were letting their kids give out more than one guaranteed place in a year to a raw eighteen-year-old, and Chloe had made anxiously clear at every opportunity I gave her that the spot was being held for me. Even if I didn’t ever take it up, that didn’t mean that Liesel would get invited after the fact.
Of course, it wouldn’t have said much for her brains if she wasn’t smart enough to make sure that she was getting a guaranteed spot before she unbuttoned her blouse the rest of the way, so even if I was handing her useful information, there was an implied insult going along with it. She took it accordingly. “How nice for you,” she said, even more furious, closed her lip gloss with a snap, swept the handful of jars and things on the counter back into her washbag, and marched out of the loo without looking back.
“Well done,” I told myself in the mirror around my toothbrush. I had to rush now, since the first warning bell was going, so I scrubbed my teeth as quick as I could before dashing back out into the corridor, where I skidded right off my heels and smashed my head backwards onto the floor. Liesel had poured out the rest of her hard-brewed lip gloss into a puddle just outside the door, enough of a sacrifice to cast a clever little trip the next person who comes along hex. I knew what had happened even while I was on the way down: the moment I’d stepped on the slick patch, I’d felt the malicious intent of the spell, only it was too late for me to do anything about it.
I did manage to twist a bit falling, which either helped or made things worse, I don’t know. I didn’t die and I wasn’t knocked unconscious, I don’t think, but it was certainly bad enough. My whole head was a church bell someone had clanged back and forth with too much enthusiasm, and my elbow and hips would have been in screaming pain if screaming out loud wasn’t the equivalent of shouting, Dinner is served! to every mal in hearing range. Instead I curled into a ball like a child and shut my mouth tight over stifled high-pitched sobbing, both my hands wrapped around the throbbing back of my skull and my whole face screwed up with tears.