“How do you know that?” Oliver asks. There’s an edge to his voice, like he’s just found out we’re all in on a joke at his expense. But I’m as shocked as he is.

“I felt it,” Maxine says matter-of-factly. “I felt it when he opened that bottle. I am rather good at that, sensing power. That’s the whole thing about me.”

Pascal presses his lips together in a tight line. “Magic? Qu-est-ce que la magic?”

Maxine tsks. “I know you understand us. You’ve been speaking fluent English all night.”

“Maxine, be nice,” Oliver says. “You’ve had some champagne. Pascal goes to the Sorbonne with me. He’s in all my art history classes. Sometimes people are just people.”

Oliver’s panic at the idea of Pascal keeping a secret from him sends a fissure through my heart. I’m keeping secrets from him too. He deserves better, but I can’t help it.

“Oh yeah?” I don’t like the look on Maxine’s face. It’s the same look she gets when we play cards or fight over whether to stay in Forest Park for the weekend or take the ambulance into Manhattan. It’s the look she gets when she knows she’s just been faced with a challenge she can win.

She stands up, brushes herself off, and pulls a pin from her hair. It’s got a blue-and-green enamel butterfly on one end, and a sharp silver point on the other.

I should stop it, tell her it’s time to go home and to be nice to poor Pascal. But I’m too curious to see what she’ll do next.

This late, mist pours in from the river, leaving the city below us looking as if it’s suspended in a bank of clouds.

We all watch in silence as she lays it carefully in the palm of her hand, narrows her eyes, and then with a flash of magic, the pin flies, pointy end first, directly at Pascal’s face.

He gasps in shock, and then, as if it was swatted down from the air, the pin falls to the stone steps with a harmless little ting.

For a second, we all sit there breathing, trying to process what we just witnessed. Maxine begins to laugh, and sits right back down on the steps next to Pascal, who looks too stunned to speak.

Maxine turns to Oliver. “Told you so.” After nearly a decade of honing her power, Maxine is never wrong.

And instead of shock or surprise, the first emotion I feel is the sickening roil of jealousy. Because here’s another person who has magic that works when mine doesn’t.

I couldn’t have protected myself from Maxine’s hairpin. It makes me feel exposed all over as the realization dawns I can’t protect myself from anything.