Chapter Two: Rules of Being Normal
Elle would spend most of her second week of normal high school discovering that the hardest part of pretending to be ordinary wasn't hiding the magic at all — it was hiding how much she was starting to like the boy who kept finding excuses to walk her to class.
That was Thursday afternoon. First, there was the vending machine.
"Okay, moment of truth." Jasper fed a crumpled dollar into the machine outside the gym with the solemn ceremony of a man performing a sacred ritual. "This is the one that doesn't eat your money. I've tested it extensively."
"How extensively?"
"Four dollars' worth of testing, over several months. I take snack science very seriously." He pressed the button for a bag of pretzels, and the machine whirred obediently, dropping the bag without incident. "See? Reliable. Unlike the one by the science wing, which is basically a small, hungry demon."
Elle laughed, the sound coming easier now than it had that first chaotic day, and accepted the pretzels he handed her without being asked, a small, ordinary gesture that still managed to send a warm little flutter through her chest every time he did something like it. A week into her strange double life, she had begun cataloguing these moments almost without meaning to — the specific crooked angle of his smile when he was genuinely amused rather than just being polite, the way he doodled tiny, surprisingly detailed birds in the margins of his notes during Mr. Halloran's lectures, the fact that he always seemed to know, somehow, exactly when she'd gotten quietly overwhelmed by the ordinary chaos of hallways and lunch lines and offered an easy joke to pull her back out of her own head.
This is what normal feels like, she thought, trailing him toward their usual spot on the low wall outside the cafeteria. Pretzels and terrible vending machine jokes. I could get very used to this.
She had not gotten any better, in the intervening week, at fully suppressing the small automatic pull of her magic. It surfaced in tiny, manageable ways almost daily — a wilting plant in the school office perking up when she lingered too long beside it waiting for a late slip, a paper cut on her own finger closing itself half a shade faster than it should have while she wasn't paying close enough attention, a wilted classroom fern near the window that had, inexplicably, put out three new leaves overnight after she'd spent an entire study hall sitting beside it. Nothing catastrophic. Nothing that had drawn a single suspicious glance from anyone but herself. But she felt it building under her skin the way a held breath eventually demanded release, an old, patient hunger that had spent sixteen years mostly getting exactly what it wanted the instant it wanted it.
"You're doing the thing again," Jasper said, settling onto the wall beside her, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.
"What thing?"
"The staring-into-the-middle-distance thing. You do it right before you say something weird and interesting." He unwrapped his own sandwich, entirely unbothered, like he'd already decided her occasional strangeness was simply one more fact about her worth cataloguing rather than worrying over. "Go on. Hit me with it."
"That's a very specific thing to have noticed about someone you met a week ago."
"I notice things." Jasper shrugged, a little self-conscious about it now that she'd pointed it out directly. "My mom says it's because I spent too many years being the youngest of four brothers, always trying to figure out which one was about to steal my food or start a fight. Hyper-vigilance, she calls it. I call it a useful party trick."
"Four brothers. That explains a lot, actually." Elle considered him with fresh interest. "Like your bottomless patience for terrible vending machine jokes. You've probably had worse thrown at you your whole life."
"Devastating burns, daily, since birth." Jasper grinned. "You get tough or you get roasted alive. I chose tough. Mostly."
He noticed. He actually noticed and he's not running away from it. Elle considered, for one reckless half second, how much simpler everything would be if she could just tell him the truth — the magic, the house behind the gates, sixteen years of careful, guarded silence — and felt the familiar cold weight of every warning she'd ever been given settle back over the impulse before it could fully form.
"I was just thinking about how weird it is that I've lived here my whole life and never really talked to people my own age before this year," she said instead, which was, if not the whole truth, at least an honest piece of it. "Homeschooled. Big family. It's a whole thing."
"That does sound like a whole thing." Jasper studied her for a moment, curious rather than suspicious, the particular expression of someone assembling a puzzle without any urgency about finishing it. "For what it's worth, you're doing a really good normal-teenager impression. If that's what this is."
If that's what this is. The observation landed somewhere uncomfortably close to true, and Elle busied herself with her pretzels rather than examine it too closely.
They spent the rest of lunch period the way they'd spent most of the week's lunch periods, trading easy, meandering conversation about nothing in particular — a movie Jasper wanted to see, a book Elle had read four times because the library at home never seemed to run out of anything, the ongoing, deeply serious debate about which cafeteria lunch lady handed out the most generous portions of tater tots. It felt, increasingly, like the kind of easy friendship Elle had read about in a hundred different novels and never once expected to actually experience herself, and she found herself, by Thursday, deliberately extending small errands and hallway detours by whole extra minutes just for the chance at a few more of his terrible jokes.
She didn't notice, at first, that her own mood had started leaking home with her.
"You're humming," Dante observed that evening, looking up from the newspaper he was pretending to read in the kitchen, though Elle privately suspected the newspaper was mostly cover for keeping an unobtrusive eye on her, the way he always positioned himself somewhere with a clear sightline to the door. Uncle Dante was not, strictly speaking, her actual uncle — none of them were, not by blood, not even her father, though the whole tangled found-family arrangement had never once felt like it needed that particular technicality spelled out. "You don't hum."
"I do too hum."
"You hum exactly never, in sixteen years of observation, and today you have hummed three separate times since walking through that door." Dante set the newspaper down entirely, folding his big, scarred hands together on the table, watching her with the same sharp, patient attention he brought to everything, whether it was balancing the family's more complicated ledgers or teaching her, at age nine, how to properly disarm a simple trap. "Something happened at that school."
"Nothing happened." Elle poured herself a glass of water with studied casualness, avoiding his gaze. "School happened. That's it."
"Mm." Dante did not look remotely convinced, but he also, mercifully, did not push further, which was more restraint than she'd honestly expected from a man who once interrogated a florist for two hours over a suspiciously timed delivery to the house. "Your father wants a full report at dinner. I'd recommend having your story straight before then."
A full report. Elle's stomach dropped slightly, though she kept her expression carefully neutral. Dinner reports were an old, established ritual in the Castellano household — not interrogations exactly, though they occasionally bordered close to it, more a nightly accounting of Elle's day that the whole extended, dangerous family seemed to consider their due, a way of staying close to the one soft, ordinary thing in a house otherwise built around considerably harder business.
Dinner itself passed without incident, mostly, Elle offering carefully edited highlights about AP Biology and the school's admittedly excellent tater tots while her father listened with the particular, focused attention he brought to everything involving her, a man who ran an empire built on fear and consequence somehow softening, every single time, the moment his daughter started talking about her day. Even the youngest cousins, usually restless and loud through the first half of any family dinner, tended to quiet down a little whenever Elle had the table's attention, as though some instinct in the whole strange household recognized her ordinary chatter as something worth protecting.
It was Marco's arrival, twenty minutes into dessert, that changed the evening's entire temperature.
He came in through the side entrance rather than the front, which was already unusual enough to make three separate conversations stop mid-sentence, and crossed straight to Vincent's side to murmur something low and quick that Elle couldn't quite catch from her end of the table.
Her father's expression did not change, exactly, but something in the room shifted anyway, the particular stillness that always preceded him deciding something significant. "Elowen," he said finally, setting down his fork with deliberate care. "The boy from your biology class. Jasper Reed."
Oh no. Elle felt every drop of blood in her body relocate somewhere cold and unhelpful. "What about him?"
"Marco tells me you spent thirty-one minutes at a vending machine today, when the walk from your last class to the pickup circle should reasonably take perhaps six." Vincent's voice remained perfectly level, which somehow made it worse rather than better. "I am curious what precisely occupied the remaining twenty-five."
"We were talking. That's allowed, isn't it? Talking to people is generally considered a normal high school activity, Papa."
"I did not say it was forbidden." Something that might, on a more expressive man, have qualified as the beginning of amusement flickered at the corner of Vincent's mouth, gone again almost before Elle could be certain she'd seen it. "I am simply noting that this is the first time in sixteen years my daughter has hummed while unloading the dishwasher, and I find myself curious about the specific cause."
Around the table, several of the family's less diplomatically restrained members had stopped even pretending not to listen. Elle caught Dante's poorly hidden grin, caught one of the younger cousins outright snickering into her napkin, and felt her face go warm with the particular mortification reserved exclusively for being lightly, affectionately teased by an entire household of dangerous men who apparently considered her love life a matter of shared family interest.
"It's not a cause," she said, with as much dignity as she could manage. "He's just a friend. From class."
"Of course." Vincent inclined his head, the picture of perfect, unbothered agreement, which fooled absolutely no one at the table. "A friend. From class."
Elle excused herself shortly after, retreating to her room with the specific, hunted feeling of someone who suspected, correctly, that this particular conversation was very far from finished, and it was nearly midnight, staring at her ceiling and replaying every single moment of the vending machine conversation with an obsessiveness she refused to examine too closely, when her phone buzzed with a text from an unknown number.
Hey, it's Jasper. Got your number from the class roster app, hope that's not weird. Wanted to say today was fun. See you tomorrow?
Elle stared at the message for a long moment, something warm and dangerous unfurling in her chest, and had just typed out a reply when a second, much colder thought arrived directly behind the first one — the memory of Marco's eyes in the rearview mirror, watchful and knowing, and the unsettling, unshakable certainty that somewhere out there, beyond the careful walls of her family's protection, someone else had been watching that vending machine conversation too, and for reasons considerably less friendly than a boy who liked terrible jokes and reliable pretzels, someone patient enough to wait and see exactly how much she was starting to care.