It feels like pretending now, standing in front of a class, my class. Nineteen baby witches, all looking to me to learn the basics of elemental and magical manipulation. The magic isn’t complicated—simple spells to unlock doors or float something across the room. But my broad-shouldered stance and unwavering voice are all playacting.

“Is everything all right, Miss Hallowell?”

Of course, it’s Bernice who asks, the little teacher’s pet. She’s sitting in the front row, her hands folded politely in her lap, her freckled face looking up at me. She’s the kind of perfect student I never could manage to be.

“Everything is fine, just lost in thought. And it’s Frances, Bernice. Please.” I’m barely their teacher. Just last year I was sitting in the same seat she was. It’s only out of necessity that I’m standing in front of the blackboard now.

Headmistress Florence called me into her office last fall to ask for “a favor.” I think she thought it would be good for me to take on some responsibility. I overheard her wife, Ann, tell her it might help me to stop moping around the library so much.

I took umbrage with that. Sure, I sometimes sulk. I rarely mope.

Bernice nods with the wide-eyed enthusiasm of a golden retriever. You’d never know her power was awakened just three months ago after her mother passed.

“Have you all been practicing?”

Their nineteen little heads nod at me.

“Very good then, please turn to page thirty-eight in your fall semester packets.”

Copying spells down from the The Elemental, the book Lena, Maxine, and I found in the woods, what feels like a lifetime ago, was no easy task. In the end, it was Oliver who did it. In his neat, university student penmanship, he created a curriculum from the disorganized spell book. For all the trouble it once caused, the magic inside of its pages proved worth knowing. At least some of the spells.

On page thirty-eight my students find, in bullet points and careful diagrams, instructions for how to spark a small blue flame between their thumb and forefinger.

We’ve been working on object manipulation for the past few weeks, and moving on to elemental magic has become one of my favorite things about being a teacher.

I talk them through the spell, then release them to try it themselves.

Bernice furrows her brow as she snaps her fingers over and over again.

“Snapping isn’t part of the spell, Bernice,” Bess whispers next to her. In the next moment, a light pops into being between Bess’s fingers. She shouts and stands so quickly she topples over her chair, right into Georgia, who falls directly into Charlotte’s lap. The movement bumps Yael’s arm, sending her flame colliding with Berta, whose cape immediately catches fire.