“There is no reason to be up all hours doing homework,” she says, launching into the lecture I’ve heard a million times before. “You go to bed at a reasonable hour, and you wake up in the morning to finish things up. You need sleep to do your best work.”

“Sleep is for the weak,” I deadpan. She quirks an eyebrow at me, unamused.

“Brockton Scholars are well-rested,” she says. That, of course, is complete and utter Mom Nonsense. You have to be many things to win the Brockton Scholarship—magically brilliant, academically perfect, chronically overcommitted—but well-rested is not a required quality. She sighs, shaking her head. “Bed. Now.” She turns the lights off and leaves, as if I’m going to immediately throw myself into my bed smelling of potion with arrowroot residue all over my hands.

My mom’s parenting style is 25 percent “you stress yourself out too much” and 75 percent “be the best that ever was.” She doesn’t see the contradiction there and doesn’t appreciate when I’ve tried to point it out.

When I look at myself in the mirror the next morning, I want to crawl back into bed. The bags under my eyes could be checked as flight luggage. My brown hair looks greasy as hell too. I need to restraighten it soon.

I tie my hair up, slap on some Face Awake potion to shrink the bags under my eyes, and put on mascara. By the time I walk into the kitchen, I look a little tired instead of like a corpse.

“You okay there?” Dad says, eyeing me over his oatmeal. He’s dressed in his Green Witch work T-shirt, ready to head out after breakfast. He hunches in his seat, because he always sits in the chair under the low-hanging light, even though he’s so tall that he’s in real danger of whacking his pale, bald head on it.

“I’m tired,” I say, sitting across the table from him. Mom slides a bowl of oatmeal and a mug of coffee onto my place setting. “Thanks.”

Dad’s blue eyes twinkle. “Hi, Tired, I’m Dad.”

I boo him and make a face. “It’s too early for dad jokes.”

“It’s never too early for dad jokes,” he quips.

“Little miss was up at all hours of the night brewing a potion in her room,” Mom tells Dad. She purses her lips and aggressively refills his coffee cup.

“I had a lot of homework,” I mumble into my mug, breathing in the scent of Mom’s coffee. I swear she does something to the magic in it, because it’s way more effective than any other coffee, but I can’t get her to admit it.

“Oh, you think you’re grown now? You can just be up all hours?” Mom says.