Fangirl

want me to come up with you?”
    “No. That’ll just make it worse.”
    He laughed.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I just flashed back to your first day of kindergarten. You cried. And your mom cried. It felt like we were never gonna see you guys again.”
    “Where was Wren?”
    “God, I don’t know, probably anointing her first boyfriend.”
    “Mom cried?”
    Her dad looked sad again and smiled ruefully. “Yeah…”
    “I really hate her,” Cath said, shaking her head, trying to imagine what kind of mother cried on the first day of kindergarten, then walked out in the middle of third grade.
    Her dad nodded. “Yeah…”
    “Answer your phone,” Cath said.
    “I will.”
    *   *   *
    “Somebody else got Ugg boots for Christmas,” Reagan said, watching the dinner line empty into the dining room. “If we had whiskey, this is when we’d take a shot.”
    “I find Ugg boots really comforting,” Cath said.
    “Why? Because they’re warm?”
    “No. Because they remind me that we live in a place where you can still get away with, even get excited about, Ugg boots. In fashionable places, you have to pretend that you’re over them, or that you’ve always hated them. But in Nebraska, you can still be happy about new Ugg boots. That’s nice. There’s no end of the innocence.”
    “You’re such a weirdo…,” Reagan said. “I kinda missed you.”
     
    “I just don’t want to,” Simon said.
    “Don’t want to what?” Baz asked. He was sitting on his desk, eating an apple. He left the apple in his teeth and started tying his green and purple school tie. Simon still had to use a mirror for that. Even after seven years.
    “Anything,” Simon said, pressing his head back into his pillow. “I don’t want to do anything. I don’t even want to start this day because then I’ll just be expected to finish it.”
    Baz finished his half-Windsor and took a bite out of the apple. “Now, now, Snow, that doesn’t sound like ‘the most powerful magician in a hundred ages’ talking.”
    “That’s such crap,” Simon said. “Who even started calling me that?”
    “Probably the Mage. He won’t shut up about you. ‘The one who was prophesied,’ ‘the hero we’ve been waiting for,’ et cetera.”
    “I don’t want to be a hero.”
    “Liar.” Baz’s eyes were cool grey and serious.
    “Today,” Simon said, chastened. “I don’t want to be a hero today.”
    Baz looked at his apple core, then tossed it onto Simon’s desk. “Are you trying to talk me into skipping Politickal Science?”
    “Yes.”
    “Done,” Baz said. “Now, get up.”
    Simon grinned and leapt out of bed.

    —from Carry On, Simon, posted January 2012 by FanFixx.net author Magicath

 
    TWENTY-THREE
    “What does ‘inc’ mean?” Cath asked.
    Reagan looked up from her bed. She was making flash cards (Reagan liked flash cards), and there was a cigarette hanging from her mouth, unlit. She was trying to quit smoking. “Ask that question again so it makes sense.”
    “I-n-c,” Cath said. “I got my grades back, but instead of an A or a B, it says, ‘inc.’”
    “Incomplete,” Reagan said. “It means they’re holding your grade.”
    “Who is?”
    “I don’t know, your professor.”
    “Why?”
    “ I don’t know. It’s usually, like, a special thing, like when you get extra time to make something up.”
    Cath stared at her grade report. She’d made up her Psychology final the first week back, so she was expecting to see the A there. (Her grade was so high in Psychology, she practically didn’t need to take the final.) But Fiction-Writing was a different story. Without turning in a final project, the best that Cath had expected was a C—and a D was far more likely.
    Cath was okay with that, she’d made peace with that D. It was the price she’d decided to pay for last semester. For Nick. And Levi. For plagiarism. It was the price for learning that she didn’t want to write books about decline and desolation in rural America, or about anything else.
    Cath was ready to take her D and move on.
    Inc.
    “What am I supposed to do?” she asked Reagan.
    “Fuck, Cath. I don’t know. Talk to your professor. You’re giving me lung cancer.”
    *   *   *
    This was Cath’s third time back in Andrews Hall since she got her grades back.
    The first two times, she’d walked in one end of the building and walked straight through to the door on the other side.
    This time was already better. This time, she’d