Kya

I glared at the pencil I had thrown onto my bedroom floor a few seconds ago. The lilting, sweet notes of my sister’s flute drifted in through my shut door, followed by a loud clunk and a “drat!”.

Ren was practicing some sort of levitation spell. It didn’t appear to be going well.

I sighed and ducked to pick up the mistreated writing implement. For a myriad of reasons, I had to master this spell.

One was that I had a quiz tomorrow I needed to not fail, to maintain my precarious B, to maintain my increasingly imperiled honor roll designation, to maintain my life and future as I knew it.

Drama queen? Nah.

And, I knew for a fact this was actual important life knowledge. No math magician had ever gotten a decent, rewarding job without knowing how to take the integral of a function.

So I had been told.

And they definitely didn’t get to be a policy expert without knowing how to deconstruct complex international problems—much less an alarm clock—down to their basic parts and concepts. If I was going to follow in my parents’ footsteps like I’d always wanted, I had to figure this out.

Ren

I glared at my penciled in notes on the stand in front of me. This wasn’t working. Why wasn’t this working?

This was the most complex spell I’d ever written. Last night, I’d levitated my stuffed animal with a few bars, and now I wanted more. I wanted to make the flimsy giraffe fly. I’d called in Pepper for help because our magic together would be easier.

Pepper was my best friend. He was currently perched on my desk with his bassoon, craned over to read the notes I kept changing every five seconds, and watching me warily. It seemed like a remarkably uncomfortable position to play in.

My piece didn’t violate the rules, did it? I didn’t see how, but the rules were always violated when I least expected them to be. Magic had rules and ethics. Neither were to be broken—rules couldn’t be, and ethics shouldn’t be. The ethics were easy: don’t hurt people with magic. The rules were harder: magic can’t violate the laws of physics. The problem was the laws of physics.

I had a C in physics. I knew I couldn’t make something out of nothing, but the laws seemed to me to change depending on what was being done and it was difficult to keep track. I couldn’t see how the spell I had in front of me was attempting to break any rules. There must be a different problem stopping Lulu the giraffe from sailing through the air.

I crossed out the three notes at the end of the fourth measure and changed them. “Again,” I told Pepper.

Kya

I redirected my gaze to the notebook paper and rewrote the equation for the thousandth time, hoping starting again would finally work. I underlined each part, granting myself that this was no basic anti-derivative, no simple deconstruction. The alarm clock faced me menacingly. I pictured the sweater I’d successfully unwound with the power rule, and the pen I’d taken apart with the quotient rule. I scrawled these rules in the margin and willed them to work on this function.

The third attempt had promise, the alarm clock top falling off and the numbers blinking into oblivion, but by the end it just beeped annoyingly.

I sighed. My sister could do this with a sweet sonata, quick and pretty; I’d seen it. My dad could take this same pencil and the clock would appear on the paper in seconds, deconstructed on my desk in moments. My mom could achieve the same with a few colorful brushstrokes.

I’d wanted their magic. It was technically inherited, after all (so I was saved from having cooking magic, it never having appeared in our family tree), but forgotten magics often reappeared after generations. I adored my parents’ art magic, but I’d suspected early I didn’t have it; my 2^nd grade teacher had called my kitty cat illustration a beautiful banana. Next, I’d hoped for music like my sister; I adored my violin after all, and this was when she was having such fun learning beginner spells.

But on my decision day, when I met with my counselor and she “suggested” my magic was math, I agreed instantly. We both knew: I could do my times tables faster than anyone in my class and my paper turning colors when I was doing sums was becoming a common occurrence. The week before, my paper mâché flower art project had burst into flames when I tried to divide fractions.

I’d cried on my decision day. Everyone else celebrated: Mom made a blueberry cake and framed the spell, calming purple and blue swirls. Ren had made (a small amount of) confetti fall with a stilted etude. They clapped for me, let me light the candles with fractions, gifted me a calculator, and Aunt Lily, the only living math magician in the family, called with her congratulations and support.

I supposed I could call Aunt Lily now. That would probably get me past this quicker, but though she was fun to play board games with, when it came to math explanations, she talked too fast and was always impatient with my problem solving.

Ren

The giraffe flopped off the bureau but fell to Pepper’s feet. He poked her tentatively and gave me a guilty look.
“I missed the flat”.

I smiled, relieved it was an execution problem and not a writing problem. “No problem! Let’s do it again.” I replaced Lulu.

It was not an execution problem.

I put the flute down and sat on my bed, dejected. I needed to be able to make up spells. I was going to travel the world to learn people’s magic, to share it, to analyze it. I needed to know how I did it to know how they did. I needed to know how to create.

I flexed my fingers, considering, and my eyes drifted to the ocean painting on my wall.

My room was decorated with my parent’s art and Pepper’s. He was one of the few that had two (or more) magics. Music was his primary one, so he was in my classes, but he could do amazing things with both music and art. I dreamed of writing spells that could unite multiple magics, but multiple magicians was about all I could handle at the moment.

I took the sheet music and tapped out the rhythm on my thigh. Pepper occupied himself reorganizing my bookshelf. Aha! This measure was wrong, the counting was impossible. I fixed it, hoping to get Lulu a bit further.

Next, I added a repeat and a coda in hopes I could land the stuffed animal too. The notes sounded awkward when I tested them, chiding me for not spending enough time in my textbook. Pepper tossed the tome to me and I flipped through for guidance to smooth the piece out.

“Ok,” I announced, “Let’s play it again.”

Kya

My violin stared at me, tempting me. I gave in, not at all reluctant to forget the spell for a few moments, but got only a few wistful strokes of the bow before Ren was banging on my door.

“Kya, I’m playing!”

I groaned and put it away. It was frustrating that Ren and I couldn’t get spell help from our parents or each other. Frustrating, but common.

The best magicians were born to parents with the same magic who were born to parents with the same magic and so on. It wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but it was more often true. Skill and talent at magic wasn’t genetic, but complex magic was hard. Knowledgeable families helped.

Like my friend Becki. Both her parents were math magicians, and she was brilliant at it.

Becki! I grabbed the pencil and scribbled out the quadratic equation I knew by heart to call her, factoring with ease.

Her face popped up in a window over my desk and relief flooded me.

“Hi Kya,, she said, looking up.

“Hello,” I told her. “Can you please, please help me with this antiderivative spell? I have a very stubborn alarm clock to dismantle.”

“Yeah, of course, what do you have?”

More relief.

Becki walked me through the magic and after fifteen minutes, a few concerning puffs of air, and some exciting sizzles, my alarm clock had been forced into cords, batteries, and mysterious metal parts lying in neat rows on my desk.

I shouted with joy and Becki laughed at this overreaction to math gone right. My outburst mixed with the music and another loud CLUNK came from across the hall, followed by a “drat!”.

 

Ren

Lulu fell to the ground again, but it was Kya’s fault this time. I picked the giraffe up with a sigh but laughed when I met Pepper’s amused eyes. I guess she’d finally figured out her spell. Or something could be on fire, but the ensuing giggles reassured me an accident was not the case. It had been known to happen; my sister’s magic was stronger than she knew.

Mine was not. Almost everything I had ever made happen with my flute was planned, all though I’d also planned for plenty of things to happen that didn’t. We played my piece again and the stuffed animal got further, but ‘flying’ was still a stretch to describe the movement.

“Can I?” Pepper asked, gesturing to the music. He asked now before critiquing or suggesting, scarred from the many times I couldn’t handle criticism or just wanted to figure it out myself. I was embarrassed about it, but still stubborn. I nodded. “It sounds like we’re from two different worlds,” Pepper said. “In the third line and the coda. And I think we’re in time, so maybe you could change one of the parts there.”

“The flute is supposed to be flying too far,” I explained. “And the bassoon is supposed to be grounding, but it just sounds like they’re arguing.”

He nodded but kept quiet. I picked up my pencil and reworked the grounding part, adding more echoes, a different chord. Then I let the flute swoop a little closer to the ground, a little farther into the sky, at different times.

“Again?” Pepper asked. I nodded and lifted the flute to my lips.

I focused on the image in my head to guide the sounds I was making. The notes went just a little too far up, buoyed by the bassoon part. I let the instrument sing, swooping up and down.

Lulu the stuffed giraffe sailed across my room and landed softly on my nightstand. I grinned.