Page 49 of Grimoire Girls Expulsion

She stops in the doorway and looks me up and down. She's wearing Everly's old coat in August, in this heat, with her white hair in a long braid over one shoulder. The women all stop talking at once, like a class when the teacher walks in, except none of them look scared of her. They look glad.

I've never met her, but I've been hearing about her all year. In my notebook she's Grandma Grimoire, which I'm not going to say to her face. I decided not to like her on principle, and so far the principle is even holding up in person.

"Miss Leigh. I wondered when you'd come."

"I didn't know I was coming until a bird showed me the road."

"Finish your shortbread." She comes to the table and sits down across from me. Marjorie gets up and pours her coffee, black, without being asked, and Helena wraps her hands around the mug without drinking any of it. "You're like them. You're like Miss Grey, too—more than them, less than her." She tilts her head at me. "They told you your whole life you couldn't do anything."

I don't say anything. She's right, and everyone at this table knows it, because someone told them the same thing.

"I can fix that. I can open you to the lines, the way I opened these women—the way I opened those boys on the hill. Ley magic doesn't care about spells. It comes when you want it, which is the only way your magic has ever worked. You'd be strong. You'd never fail another practical as long as you live."

The whole table is looking at me. Marjorie is smiling at me so hopefully it's painful, and under the table the sisters are holding hands.

I think about it. I'd be lying if I said I didn't. I think about every practical I've failed, and does not respond written on every report since I was a first-year, and the instructors who stopped looking at me halfway through my first semester. I think about raising my hand and having the thing I asked for come out the right size, in the right place, every single time.

Then I think about the woman across the table, who watched the Well pull on Everly without saying a word. Everly's hands shook the whole time she told me about it.

I think about the folder in Wheeler's desk with my name on it, too, and how much I hated that someone else got to decide what went in it.

"No," I say.

Helena raises her eyebrows.

"No, thanks. I'm good."

"You're not good. You're hiding in a building no one can see, and the school wants you dead."

"I'm still good." I finish my coffee and set the mug down on the oilcloth. "People have been deciding what I am since I was eighteen. I'm not letting one more do it, even if she's nicer about it. I'll figure it out myself."

No one at the table moves. One of the sisters lets go of the other's hand.

Then Helena smiles, which I don't expect. It's a small smile, a little sad, and for a moment she looks younger.

"Cordelia would have said that." She lifts her untouched coffee an inch in my direction. "Have it your way, Miss Leigh."

Dana walks me down to the end of the road when I leave. The sun is going down behind the hills, the sky's gone orange, and the dust on the road has finally cooled. She has her hands in the pockets of her gas station jacket, the blue one with her name stitched on the front, and she walks slowly, because she has a whole night shift on her feet ahead of her and she's in no hurry to start it.

"She's going to fix everything, you know. Helena. She told me so."

"Fix it how?"

"All of it. The school. What they do to girls like us." She kicks a stone ahead of her down the road. "She said the world won't stop eating grimoires until grimoires are the ones holding the door."

I stop walking.

"Say that again."

Dana says it again, word for word, without having to stop and think. "I wrote it down after." She smiles at me over her shoulder. "I liked it."

The bus comes at the crossroads. When I get on, Dana lifts one hand out of her pocket and waves, then stands there by the gas pumps until I can't see her anymore.

I ride back south with my forehead against the window. It's dark by the time the farms turn back into strip malls, and my face looks back at me out of the glass the whole way while I try really hard not to like that sentence as much as I do.

When I get back to Concordia it's late, and the house is asleep. I go up to my room, turn on the lamp, and get out my notebook—the one I've been keeping since spring, with everything I can do written in it and the date I did it. I turn past all of it to a clean page at the very back and write Helena's sentence down exactly.

The world won't stop eating grimoires until grimoires are the ones holding the door.