Fangirl

I recognize a few of you—” She smiled around the room at people who weren’t Cath.
    Cath was clearly the only freshman in the room. She was just starting to figure out what marked the freshmen.… The too-new backpacks. Makeup on the girls. Jokey Hot Topic T-shirts on the boys.
    Everything on Cath, from her new red Vans to the dark purple eyeglasses she’d picked out at Target. All the upperclassmen wore heavy black Ray-Ban frames. All the professors, too. If Cath got a pair of black Ray-Bans, she could probably order a gin and tonic around here without getting carded.
    “Well,” Professor Piper said. “I’m glad you’re all here.” Her voice was warm and breathy—you could say “she purred” without reaching too far—and she talked just softly enough that everyone had to sit really still to hear her.
    “We have a lot to do this semester,” she said, “so let’s not waste another minute of it. Let’s dive right in.” She leaned forward on the desk, holding on to the lip. “Are you ready? Will you dive with me?”
    Most people nodded. Cath looked down at her notebook.
    “Okay. Let’s start with a question that doesn’t really have an answer.… Why do we write fiction?”
    One of the older students, a guy, decided he was game. “To express ourselves,” he offered.
    “Sure,” Professor Piper said. “Is that why you write?”
    The guy nodded.
    “Okay … why else?”
    “Because we like the sound of our own voices,” a girl said. She had hair like Wren’s, but maybe even cooler. She looked like Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby (wearing a pair of Ray-Bans).
    “Yes,” Professor Piper laughed. It was a fairy laugh, Cath thought. “That’s why I write, definitely. That’s why I teach. ” They all laughed with her. “Why else?”
    Why do I write? Cath tried to come up with a profound answer—knowing she wouldn’t speak up, even if she did.
    “To explore new worlds,” someone said.
    “To explore old ones,” someone else said. Professor Piper was nodding.
    To be somewhere else, Cath thought.
    “So…,” Professor Piper purred. “Maybe to make sense of ourselves?”
    “To set ourselves free,” a girl said.
    To get free of ourselves.
    “To show people what it’s like inside our heads,” said a boy in tight red jeans.
    “Assuming they want to know,” Professor Piper added. Everyone laughed.
    “To make people laugh.”
    “To get attention.”
    “Because it’s all we know how to do.”
    “Speak for yourself,” the professor said. “I play the piano. But keep going—I love this. I love it.”
    “To stop hearing the voices in our head,” said the boy in front of Cath. He had short dark hair that came to a dusky point at the back of his neck.
    To stop, Cath thought.
    To stop being anything or anywhere at all.
    “To leave our mark,” Mia Farrow said. “To create something that will outlive us.”
    The boy in front of Cath spoke up again: “Asexual reproduction.”
    Cath imagined herself at her laptop. She tried to put into words how it felt, what happened when it was good, when it was working, when the words were coming out of her before she knew what they were, bubbling up from her chest, like rhyming, like rapping, like jump-roping, she thought, jumping just before the rope hits your ankles.
    “To share something true,” another girl said. Another pair of Ray-Bans.
    Cath shook her head.
    “Why do we write fiction?” Professor Piper asked.
    Cath looked down at her notebook.
    To disappear.
     
    He was so focused—and frustrated—he didn’t even see the girl with the red hair sit down at his table. She had pigtails and old-fashioned pointy spectacles, the kind you’d wear to a fancy dress party if you were going as a witch.
    “You’re going to tire yourself out,” the girl said.
    “I’m just trying to do this right,” Simon grunted, tapping the two-pence coin again with his wand and furrowing his brow painfully. Nothing happened.
    “Here,” she said, crisply waving her hand over the coin.
    She didn’t have a wand, but she wore a large purple ring. There was yarn wound round it to keep it on her finger. “Fly away home.”
    With a shiver, the coin grew six legs and a thorax and started to scuttle away. The girl swept it gently off the desk into a jar.
    “How did you do that?” Simon asked. She was a first year, too, just like him; he could tell by the green shield on the front of her sweater.
    “You don’t do magic,” she said, trying to smile