***
Do you remember
any of our friends’ whereabouts
from witch school?
I know Dylanthia went back to the ancestral lands,
Pogoth crossed the rainbow snake and got eaten,
and Xlthan fell into a mirror where they met a new crew to hang with.
Sometimes, though, I wonder if any of my friends were actually friends.
Like, you remember transformation class with Elder Cragthorn,
right?
Not for the first time, our mortality held us back–
can’t shapeshift if the bone grinding kills you in the middle of the process.
Can’t shed all that mass to change into a bat
without somehow getting it back
if you want to be human again.
But the fourth class we took on transformation,
our friend Gacks stole my plans to manually draw mass from the shade world
three different times.
And she said she was just “pranking” me,
just testing my abilities
in case
Hatter and Chire
broke into my rooms
instead of her.
You shouldn’t have beaten me to figuring out how to shapeshift.
I had it, nearly, three times.
I had it.
When our teacher awarded you top marks,
that’s when the whispers in my head started,
wondering how friendly these friends were,
pranking me,
scoffing at my roundabout efforts.
So I schemed
like I was back at being a schoolgirl,
trying to impress boys with my nails and hair,
jealous of the other girls who kept guys draped around their shoulders.
Sometimes, Clarissa, I think I never really grew out of human school, I just walked away
at graduation
and carried on with life,
and never let it let go of me.
These habits
clung like creepers in my mind:
working for a teacher’s red pen, a gold star,
a girl’s downfall,
climbing the ranks of the lunchroom
like toppling my classmates
made me worth something.
We learned from the demons to survive,
you and I.
And all our habits we never got rid of
bloomed right up to the surface;
monkshood sisters
in thistle bliss,
“This is how you win school,”
they whispered from our memories,
“you be the best,
and if you can’t be the best
you make everyone else worse.”
These habits
got us gunning at each other’s skulls
like drugged cassowaries on a warpath–
do you remember
what you paid Gacks to steal from me?
Do you remember
what you said to Xlthan
to make them flee into the mirrors?
Do you remember
scaring off Dylanthia and Pogoth
so they’d never
return?
You rotten cheater
thief
I hated you
by our sixteenth year,
did you ever figure out it was me
who poisoned your salad
before your spellcasting duel,
did you ever figure out it was me
who turned your rainbow potions project green,
did you ever figure out
who
ruined your summoning circle
after you stepped through
to the realm of mountain dragons,
and made it so you could never come back?
Jordyn Saelor 