The Scholomance Read Free

but that would have made everything that followed into a lie. Mara had
been born psychic; she knew all about lies. Connie was the one person she
wanted to be entirely honest with.
    That
was probably a mistake.
    “Do
you ever wish you were magic?” Connie had asked one night—one fateful night, as
the writers might say. It was a sleepover at Connie’s house and they were in
their pajamas up in the living room, tucked away on the floor in sleeping bags
(Mara’s sky-blue new one, bought for this event earlier that afternoon, and
Connie’s ancient army-surplus one). Connie was coloring. Fairies and dragons. She
did a lot of those. “Like, that you had powers?”
    If
ever there were to be lies between them, it would have to come now, because
that was the unavoidable question. Mara felt at Connie’s familiar rhythms of
wistfulness and daydreams, knowing it would all change if she told the truth.
    But
she had never lied to Connie. Connie was her friend. Her one and only.
    She
said, “I do.” Said it with all the solemnity of a bride in church. Said it and then
had to prove it. And when the shock and fascination faded (children were
remarkably resilient to both, Mara had found) the wistfulness remained and the
only change was envy. Not fear, not distrust, not even a bright flare of
paranoia as she thought back at all the unpleasant things Mara might have
overheard, but only envy. In retrospect, that was bad enough, but at the time,
Mara had been relieved.
    “I
wish I had what you have,” Connie had said, coloring her fairy’s hair purple. “I’d
give anything to be magic.”
    The
obsession began there. Mara really thought so. If not for that confession, that
stupid hour spent doing card tricks, Connie might have stayed with fairies and
dragons for another year or two and then gone on to boys and ponies like a
normal kid. Instead, with undeniable proof before her that mystical powers
existed, Connie had tried to make herself receive them, and no amount of
failure could ever slam the door that Mara had opened. Gone were the sleepovers
with coloring books and popcorn. Now it was all meditation and Freemasonry and
Zener cards and the books of Charles Fort.
    Mara
tried. Best friends always try. But in the end, the truth came out: You could
teach someone a foreign language with immersion and with enough time, even the
accent would come out. You could teach someone with no musical talent to play
the piano well, if not with any real passion. But no one could just teach
someone to be psychic. It was not perception so much as connection, and
somewhere inside Connie, that connection simply wasn’t there.
    Long
after she recognized the futility in Mara’s compliance, Connie never gave up. From
that moment on, her pursuit of finding magic all her own came before everything
and everyone. Every week, every day, it was something new: vampirism,
mesmerism, levitation, transcendent chants, tantric sex, voodoo, Ouija boards
and pendulums, animism, totem quests, and the Scholomance.
    Always
the Scholomance. That damned Devil’s Scholomance. All the others came and went,
debunked, outgrown, or just plain impossible to prove, but the Scholomance hung
on.
    “It’s
a school,” Connie said, that first time she’d ever dragged Mara off to the
library to hunch over a book of badly-illustrated European ghost-stories. “A
real place—”
    “Oh
Connie…”
    “—deep
in the mountains of Transylvania,” Connie stubbornly continued, now gripping
her book in both hands, as though she feared it would be snatched away and
maybe burnt. “And all kinds of magic is taught there by demons, real demons! And
only ten people get in at a time, and listen, listen! ‘There they are
trained for ten years, overcoming obstacles and surviving ordeals, and when the
course of their learning is expired, nine students are released— ” Here,
Connie looked up, actually flushed with her excitement, as any girl her age
might appear if poring over one of