Week 3: Shenanigans
"I want to be a truth teller," Mike said.
His teacher for Magical Theory, a woman almost as tall as him who probably lived in her ceremonial blue robes, looked him in the eyes. "Why?"
"Because I want to know when people are lying to me." He needed to know. Regular people had their ways of sensing lies that they thought were foolproof; twitches of eyes and corners of mouths. Mike wasn't a regular person anymore. He should do better than them now.
"Being a truth teller is about more than knowing when someone is lying to you." The teacher pursed her lips. "You will never tell another lie, or even another untruth, again. You have to take it more seriously than that."
"But--"
"You have math class now." The teacher turned away.
Mike couldn't believe that a boarding school for magical teenagers still had math class.
On the whole, magic school bore distressing similarities to real high school. He could make it rain indoors without realizing it, but he still had to struggle to stay awake in his unlucky front row seat while the English teacher droned on about Charles Dickens. Even worse, the English teacher literally had a magic eye in the back of his head. Outside the classroom, the situation showed little improvement. Hierarchies formed among the teenagers cast out from the public high schools as if they had never left, and Mike rapidly fell to the bottom rung.
"You look like you lived in a trailer park. Don't you people marry your cousins?"
"You look like a girl. And you act like one, too."
"You're weird."
Mike thanked his lucky stars that at six foot five, he couldn't fit into any lockers.
In theory, Mike understood why the sorcerers in charge of the school made sure everyone had normal educations. Most of them would leave the Palatine Order's school after obtaining a semblance of mastery over their powers to go back to the real world with a story about their experience as an exchange student in a foreign country to explain their absence. Once they returned to the real world, they would need impeccable transcripts for those ever-important college applications, and the Palatine Order would give them whatever they needed.
Mike wasn't going back. The moment that he walked beneath the stone archway leading to the school, he knew that everything that mattered from this point forward in his life lay inside the arch. The outside world had already offered him everything it ever would. The Palatine Order presented him a future better than anything he'd have back in the trailer park.
Only they didn't seem to want him.
"That's not true," his mentor in Practical Magic told him. "We want all of you to stay. There are never enough of you."
"But you want some of us to stay more than others." Mike tossed a ball of water in the air and willed it to hold its shape. "If I had any real power--" The ball burst over his head. "Whoops."
"It's fine," his mentor said.
"If I had any real power," Mike continued, "someone would have told me by now." He saw the way that the teachers fawned over the students with the strongest magic, turning their best efforts toward convincing them to stay with the Palatine Order. No one seemed to care if Mike stayed or left. "But I still want to stay."
"Good," his mentor said.
"And I want to be a truth-teller," Mike added.
His mentor asked the same question as the Magical Theory teacher: "Why?"
This time, Mike had prepared an answer. "I want to know. How the world ticks, and why it's doing the ticking." It wasn't coming out right, so Mike kept talking. "I'll never know if I don't make a commitment to the truth."
The mentor shook his head. "That won't be good enough."
"Why?" Mike asked. He'd told the truth. He really did want to understand the real reasons of the world's ticking.
"Because I know you prepared that answer. It's not the real reason."
"But it's true!"
"Not completely. If you want to be a truth-teller, you have to tell the truth to yourself first. You have to quit playing games with us. But more importantly, you have to quit playing games with yourself."
"I'm not playing games." Mike tried to create the water ball again. It collapsed before formation.
Classes went on. And on. Mike did well enough in his academic classes, but still couldn't make the turnaround with his magic. He got regular letters from his parents: We know you're doing great. Looking forward to seeing you at Christmas. We love you. So he went back for Christmas, but it didn't feel any more like home than the Palatine Order's school when he had to spend most of the trip studying magic. Okay, maybe he didn't have to, but his younger siblings wanted endless demonstrations. Plus, Mike stayed up at least half of most nights studying magic so he could keep up with the stronger students.
When Mike returned to school, he made one more request to become a truth-teller, this time to the Dean of the school.
"Why?" the Dean asked.
Mike took a deep breath. "I want the power," he said. "I know I don't have a lot of it on my own. I know I need to be a truth-teller if I want to make it here. And I want to make it here. I want you to accept me."
He watched the Dean and tried to calm his racing heart. All the while, the Dean said nothing.
Then, she smiled. "Good," the Dean told Mike. "Keep thinking like that. Keep being that honest with yourself."