nevver: Some girls, Daria Djalelova Of all the things that changed when I found out I was a witch, s

nevver: Some girls, Daria Djalelova Of all the things that changed when I found out I was a witch, summer was perhaps the best of them. Back with the Muggles, I was that weird girl with the stutter – the one who was blamed for setting Mrs. Bloute’s desk on fire after she yelled at me for not keeping up with the reading. Other girls went to each other’s houses, and rode bikes, and pretended to be princesses while I stayed at home, much to the anxious disappointment of my mother and father. They loved me, you see, and there is a terrible curse in loving a child that I didn’t understand then: the desperate need for them to be happy, and the horrible frustration that you can’t make the world see how precious they are. Some parents, like my mother, overcompensated in the hopes they could make you happy, and so I, like many girls, became the ghost at the sleepover: deeply unwelcomed and discussed only in whispers. Summers were the worst – my mother constantly needling me to go play with the other children, like a bird who believes that the chick who falls often enough will eventually learn to fly. I passed them alone for the most party, accompanied only by my books and my fear of ridicule.When I found out I was a Witch, that all changed. RPI was so different from the halls of my elementary school, and many of the children who entered through the front doors of that grand manor house were just as odd as I was – a talent for fire was nothing next to the boy who couldn’t keep his face the same shape when he was upset, and a slight stutter meant nothing to a girl who was more used to speaking to birds than people. I found friends there amongst the magical and extraordinary, and when my first summer rolled around I didn’t spend it alone. We called ourselves a Coven – mostly because the term itself has fallen so far out of favor it had come back around again, at least for us. Technically we were forbidden, outside of school, to practice magic, but we, like so many magical children, learned early on that there were certain sorceries that the Trace couldn’t track, and when we met in the woods on Bethany Johnson’s farm, a place riddled with the magic passed down through her family, we were more or less free to explore our talents.Bethany Johnson had her familial talent for trees and herbs and always smelled like wildflowers and pine; Margot Lee, of the Virginia Lees, could read the weather in the wind and was the best of us on a broom; Lana Cohen ended up leavings us after fifth year to study Naming Magic at Black Gate, but returned every summer to show us what she learned; and Susan O’Connor was a Muggleborn like me, and taught herself how to turn into a wren one summer, the same summer she taught me how to kiss.As I understand it the kids nowadays have taken themselves to calling their groups “covens” again, and I can’t help but feel like a trend-setter, even if my friends and I were anything but at RPI. It makes me smile to think of those young mages gathering in the summer, sharing magic and learning about life: outsiders all, blooming on the fringes. -- source link

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