Chapter 1 - Equinox Arts

Equinox Arts - Chapter 1

         As spring turned into summer, and school wound to a close, most of the graduating class would sneak out at night for riotous parties. It was far less common for a girl to sneak out her third-floor window just after sunrise to go to school. Lilith Carroll, however, was a decidedly uncommon young woman.

         Few would ever call her pretty, but her moonlike face has a strangely ethereal charm. She balanced on a narrow strip of nearly-flat roof with an ease that spoke of long practice. She leant back into her room and grabbed her faded blue backpack, then dropped it between her sneaker-clad feet as she wrestled the window shut. She hummed quietly as she worked, her pale lips pressed together.

         A short stroll along the ledge would bring her to the sheltering branches of the oak tree in the back yard. She and her little sister had built a treehouse there years ago, and the legacy of that summer remained as a series of footholds. The window seemed to stick open and Lilith tugged at it with more vehemence. From inside the tree’s thick foliage, a voice said, “It’d be easier to just use a spell to close it, you know.”

         Lilith grimaced to herself and said in a quiet, but firm, tone, “Get lost, Melusine.” She cocked her head to one side as she listened for her parents, but all she got for her pains was her lanky, coal-black hair falling into her eyes. There was music playing downstairs, the lyrics inaudible from this distance but the brassy notes of the horns coming through clearly. Lilith gave the window another strong tug.

         “Are you sure?” came her sister’s irritating voice, like a mosquito buzzing about her ear. “It’s dead easy, I can cast it if it gives you trouble.”“No need,” Lilith lied, “I’ve got everything under control.” To try to distract her sister, she added, “What are you doing up here, anyway?”

         “Oh, I was just taking a quick flight and I saw someone climbing in through the window.” Lilith gritted her teeth and jerked the window down as Melusine continued (her voice oozing with fake innocence), “I thought it might be a burglar, so of course I came to check it out.” The window finally fell closed, nearly nipping Lilith’s fingers.

         “Mum will be furious when she finds out you borrowed her broom,” is all Lilith said, keeping her voice calm. She didn’t want to let Mel get to her. “Especially since you’re grounded after the neighbours almost saw you last week.”

         A dismissive noise came from the tree as Lilith shouldered her backpack and snapped the waist belt into place. “Not half as mad as she’ll be when she finds out you’ve gone. You know she said to skip today. Your first-year packet’s due to arrive, and Mum’s planning to take you shopping for new clothes, gear for your dorm room, and all that stuff ... assuming you get in, anyway.” Lilith paced along the strip of roof carefully as her sister spoke, and as this gloating speech wound to a close, she peered amongst the branches to spot her sister’s face.

         It always surprised her to see how alike, and yet how unalike, her sister and she appeared. They shared the same pale skin and broad forehead, the same dark hair and thin lips. Their hair was black, though Mel wore hers in a long braid and Lilith’s was raggedly growing out of a bowl-shaped bob. They had the same nose, too, a snub that looked out of place on a long face. Lilith, though, had eyes of a dark blue shade, magnified behind wire-rimmed glasses, while Melusine’s twinkling eyes sometimes seemed blue and sometimes green. Lilith dressed tidily in blue jeans and a crimson t-shirt without logos, while Mel wore torn black jeans and a Slayer t-shirt. Lilith pushed aside the leaves and gave her sister a meaningful glare.

         “Last time I listened to Mum and skipped class, she refused to write me a note the next day and I ended up in detention for a week. So, no, I think I’d better go – you should get ready for school, yourself,” Lilith added an unsubtle hint to the end of her sentence, not that she thought it would do any good.

         “Nah. I’m going to stay home and watch the fireworks,” Mel said cheerfully, leaning against the trunk with a battered wooden broom floating beside her.

         “You’ll get in trouble,” Lilith warned. She wrapped one hand around a convenient branch and edged one foot onto another steady one. Both branches swayed slightly from her weight, but neither gave way.

         “I’ll just forge a note. I’ll even do one for you.” Lilith bit her tongue to check a hasty – and rude – response and instead swung herself out into the tree.

         Once there, she stood still for a moment, then said, “Maybe I’d rather go to school than stay home and wait for the mail. Did you ever think of that?”

         “But today’s the day they send out acceptances!” For a moment, there was real surprise and concern in Melusine’s bell-like voice. It was rapidly replaced with a mocking note, as she continued, “Or is that it? You’re afraid you won’t get in, so you’re running off to school? And so early, too....”

         “I’m going because the track team’s meeting to make banners for Prom. I’m on the track team, ergo, I will make banners.” Lilith kept her voice calm and even; she worked her way towards the trunk – and her sister’s perch.

         “What do you care about the Prom? It’s not like you’ll be going.” Melusine grinned at her older sister, who looked hurt for the first time in their bickering.

         “What do you know about it?” Lilith snapped at her sister. “You’re just a kid.” She felt momentary satisfaction at the sour expression on Melusine’s fourteen-year-old face, then it was replaced by nervousness when Melusine’s anger was replaced by a sneer.

         Melusine swung a leg over the broom as Lilith began to climb down the tree. “I bet you’re hoping that football player ... what’s his name – Mike-something-or-other – will ask you. You should be so lucky ... then you could go to a Mundy college with him, grow up to be an accountant and have fat little babies – and forget about all your weird magical family. Won’t happen, though, no matter how much you want it, because to all the people at that school, you’re the weird one. You don’t fit, you’ve got no friends, and now you’re adding crazy to that pile if you seriously think a popular guy’s going to ask you out.”

         Lilith flinched at this onslaught of venomous words, and as the tirade grew louder and more embittered, she hissed nervously, “Keep it down, whatever you think of me. Otherwise we’re both in trouble.”

         “Says you,” Melusine muttered, but she did it quietly. The abrupt silence was awkward, broken only by the rustle of leaves and the feral croon of a cat, hunting, trying to coax a bird closer.

         “Sounds like Grimmie’s hunting again,” Lilith offered, pausing in her descent. She shot a glance at Melusine, but her sister was studiously ignoring her, looking in on her dad’s second floor workshop as if she’d never noticed the stuffed crocodile before. Lilith rolled her eyes, but said, “Look, I’m sorry I called you a kid.”

         “You should be,” Melusine tossed over her shoulder, then pointedly turned her back.

         “But, you don’t have to buy in to Mum and Dad’s head games all the time. I mean, no-one who knew us would ever think we’re remotely normal. No-one else’s mom traps their kids into breaking rules!” Somehow, Lilith kept her voice to an angry hiss.

         “I bet some do!”

         “And no-one else’s dad plays practical jokes like ours does.”

         “Of course they do,” Melusine grudgingly swung about to face her sister, her grin reappearing as Lilith got angrier.

         “He filled the bathtub with snakes!”

         “They explained all that – it was to teach us vigilance. Where were you?”

         “Probably in the emergency room, getting the venom drawn out by a Healer," Lilith muttered.

         “You don’t have to be on their case all the time, you know. Just because you’re sev-en-teen—” Mel sung the syllables out, turning the word into mockery, apparently cheerful again. Lilith doubted it. Melusine had a talent for vengeance only exceeded by her knack for getting her own way. “It’s not actually law that you act like a jerk. They just want us to be ready for when we go to Equinox Arts...”

         “What if I don’t want to go there?” Lilith asked, then swallowed against the sudden feeling of nausea.

         She did have the satisfaction of seeing Melusine at a loss for words as she resumed climbing. It was a bit trickier now her hands were so clammy. When Mel finally spoke, it was in a shocked whisper. “Lilith! You’re not thinking of Resolute College, are you? Those order freaks are vicious, you know that.”

         “I didn’t say that,” Lilith denied vehemently. “But I don’t know if I want to go live in a weird realm – not even in the real world – for four years, or train to become an agent of chaos.... I just think there must be more to life.”

         “Like what?” Melusine asked, cynically. “What could be more crucial than the balance of order with chaos?” She was hovering level with the ground, a few feet below. For a bitter second, Lilith contemplated dropping onto her.

         “I don’t know,” she eventually capitulated. Lilith let herself hang from the lowest branch and dropped the last few feet. She took a couple deep breaths. “Look, I’m going to go make posters, like I said. I’ll be home right after school, so I’ll know if I got in then.”

         Mel shrugged. “Your call, I guess. But don’t think I’ll help when Mum finds out.”

         “The way she thinks, she might even be proud of me – for defying her rules. You ever think of that?” Lilith couldn’t resist a last dig at her sister as she turned to leave.

         “Mum only approves if you don’t get caught!” Mel called after her, a very valid point which Lilith chose to ignore. When she’d ended up with detention, she’d caught it even hotter at home. It was Dad who thought rebellion was promising, regardless of the situation, as long as you didn’t get careless. As she cut across the backyard and into the adjacent woodlot, Lilith wished for parents who weren’t so ... strange.

         It didn’t seem fair, really, that she was saddled with a mother who ran a mail-order potion service and played headgames as a hobby, or a father so devoted to his Grand Cause that he had a new Mundy job every year. She’d spent her entire childhood moving away just as she met people. It burned at her, having parents whose active goal was to subvert all order. And it made her absolutely livid that her little sister thrived on it like a leech on blood, while her father’s entire extended family (not her mother’s, for some reason – Lilith didn’t know why, but they were never mentioned) overlooked Lilith, or worse, saw her as a disappointment.

*****

         It was only as she approached the school that Lilith began to lose her self-righteous assurance and wonder what she was really doing. The rise on which she stood was around the back of the school – she’d crossed a golf course and a woodlot to arrive at this point overlooking the football field. In the distance ahead of her, she could see the grey brick gym and the concrete slab which was the faculty parking lot.

         She leaned against the chain-link fence which separated the course from the school and asked herself, quietly, “Was Mel right? Am I running away?” She did try to be honest with herself, if only because no-one in her family seemed to be honest with each other. Melusine, in particular, treated the truth like salt – good sprinkled about, and a bit makes the food taste more interesting, but not too much or it’s inedible. Lilith was forced to admit, only to herself, that she was afraid.

         Everyone in her family assumed she’d be attending Equinox Arts – after all, they all had. Her parents had actually met there. All of her dad’s family had attended the college, and presumably her mum’s as well.

         In the background, she could hear the thrum of car engines and knew that people were starting their days. She sighed and adjusted her backpack, glancing over her shoulder. She could just see a corner of their house from here – a steeply pitched black roof and a whitewashed wall covered in creeping vines. She bit her lower lip lightly and worried it between sharp teeth. Lilith knew, deep down, that what she resented was the assumption that she’d do the same thing the rest of her family had. What she feared was becoming so caught up in it all that she forgot about the world around her.

         She didn’t want to live her life playing games with everyone around her for her own amusement. She tossed her hair back and straightened her shoulders. Not too far away, she could hear a shrill laugh, and she started walking forward, away from the green haven of the golf course and past the bleachers. Lilith didn’t want to be caught staring at the school like it had transformed overnight. The sky had just lost the rosy glow of sunrise; the shadows around the benches were still deep and concealing.

         There were two people hidden in the shadows, Lilith noticed as she approached. One was small and slender, the other tall and broad-shouldered.

         Her attention immediately focused on Mike. He was sandy-haired and clean-shaven, with a well-muscled body from all his training. Like all his teammates, he always wore the blue-and-gold school jacket. It looked good on him, Lilith thought, nervously brushing her hair from her eyes. It made him look... important.

         She smiled and waved as he emerged from the shadows, saying “Hi, Mike! What are you doing here so early?”

         His head swivelled to turn and face her, and he said, “Oh, hi....” The shorter figure stepped forward and Lilith flinched inwardly. Jennifer, the head of the cheerleading squad, slipped her arm through Mike’s and gave Lilith a smile. It didn’t reach her eyes.

         “The cheerleaders have an early practice,” Jennifer said as though that explained everything. In a way, it did. Lilith felt her stomach sinking as Mike pulled Jennifer closer to him. “And you? On your way to the library?”

         At that moment, Lilith wished she’d studied her spellbooks more closely, maybe snuck peeks at her Dad’s books. Then she could set every perfect golden hair on Jennifer’s head on fire with enough concentration. She settled for saying, as calmly as possible, “The track team’s making posters for the Prom.”

         Despite herself, Lilith glanced at Mike, hoping for a flicker of interest on his broad face. All she saw was embarrassment. “That’s right,” Jennifer said brightly, as if just remembering, “We asked the runners to take care of painting them.”

         Her tone was dismissive and the tension between the girls was building. Even Mike seemed aware of it, for he interrupted to ask which races Lilith ran. She smiled in relief and replied, “I run the long races, mostly – the 1.5K. I’d like to do longer ones – marathon length – but the school doesn’t have the space.” They looked marginally interested, so she continued, “It’s really peaceful, you know? Just you and the track and testing your limits.”

         “Wow, that’s fascinating,” Jennifer said with no enthusiasm. “It’s been a blast chatting, but I have practice.” She shot Mike a pointed look and gave Lilith an insincere smile, then headed towards the gym. Mike waved halfheartedly, but wrapped his arm around Jennifer the moment he turned his back.

         “Goodbye!” Lilith called after him, then mentally kicked herself. They didn’t seem to notice at all. Mike’s hand was creeping into Jennifer’s back pocket as they headed into the school.

         Suddenly quite depressed, Lilith sat down on the lowest rank of the bleachers. “I try to get along, and where does it ever get me?” she inquired of the empty air, resting her head in her hands.

         She could lie to Mel easily enough, but it was true – she didn’t fit in here at all. A clatter of charms on her left wrist drew her attention, and she raised her arm to study the bracelet. It was gold, and looked like an ordinary charm bracelet at first glance. However, the charms were mostly sigils, the whole forming a protective spell. Her parents had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday.

         Lilith sighed and bit her lip again – a nervous habit of hers that she’d never managed to break. She knew they loved her, but her parents played so many games it was easy to lose sight of that. If she did get in to Equinox, she worried that she’d start acting that way.

         On the other hand, Lilith knew she no longer wanted to be at school today. Just the thought of running into Jennifer again – or worse, both of the happy new couple – made her feel dizzy and sick. And since that was the case, she realized, she might as well go home and hope Mum hadn’t noticed her absence. At least she’d be satisfied this morning.

         Lilith stood up, turned her back on the school, and started to trudge home. She didn’t feel any closer to a decision, but she did feel a bit relieved as she headed back into the pleasant coolness of the green trees and breathed the moist air, scented with the evaporating dew. Around her, the air was thrumming with the dawn-song of the birds.

© Copyright 2008 PuppyPooka (UN: ajgair at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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