Wiccan Laws - Chapter 3

Wiccan Laws (Work. T)
3.
I’ll be honest, a lot of my days were spent in a similar fashion from that day onward. I found that I could just about handle the social/work balance that Rob had achieved – unlike Scarlett, who managed to only do work in an intoxicated rush. She claims that that’s the best way for her to do it, but I don’t know. I’m not worried about her really. Neither are Matt and Laura, who are still as in love with each other as they ever were. It is very sweet (they just fit together, you know?), but they have developed the occasional habit of excessive displays of affection. I can forgive them, though; Laura’s going to Miwauda for a week, but Matt’s not allowed to go. They’re upset, but coping. He’s under strict orders, however, not to do anything stupid, and I think we’ve all been roped in to keep him in check, as it were.
         Breach seems to hover around us more and more. She and Scarlett are obsessed with Willard, much to my annoyance. I swear, he hates me for no reason. Okay, maybe I did kick him in the face, but it was an accident and he brought it on himself by grabbing my ankle! He only wants to piss me off anyway, ever since he worked it out: I’m nervous around Spirits. Denise never behaved like that – she helped me! Not that Denise has been seen since. Willard has completely taken over. This has caused a bit of tension between me and Breach, but we’re still friends... I think...
         Oh – and I started dating Rob. It came as a nice surprise, really. Neither of us noticed until Scarlett pointed out that we spent so much time together, and then it was kind of accepted. She was right, though. Whenever we organised an outing or a night together, he and I would sort of ‘separate’ ourselves and chat for hours. Not intentionally, and we did join in with everyone else; it’s just that we seemed to get on best with each other. I like the idea, though. I have a boyfriend... a nice boyfriend, one who I understand fairly well, and who has flaws that I really don’t like but can cope with (i.e. the drugs and slight laziness). Other than Kyler, who I haven’t told anyone about yet and doesn’t know about anyone else either, everyone’s cool with it, and Willard won’t touch Rob, so he leaves me alone for a bit too. Ugh, Willard again! One day, he’s going to cause some serious problems.

“What do you mean ‘not if Willard’s there’?”
“I mean, if he’s going to be dicking about and picking on me again, then I’m sorry but I don’t particularly want to sit through that!”
         Told you. Breach wanted me, her, Scarlett and Laura to go for a night out and then back to hers for a bit, just for some fun before Laura leaves, but I was worried that she would call Willard out at her place and didn’t want to go there. Breach was taking this badly.
         “He does not pick on you!”
         “He does – he knows I’m nervous and makes fun of me for it.”
         “He’s joking around, Jaimie! Just because you can’t take a joke.”
         This wasn’t our first argument about Willard, I should point out. I had objected to him appearing at our last thing, saying that he would change the mood in a strange way. Which is true, and he did, but she seems immune to this.  “Why do you hate him so much?”
         “Breach, I’ve told you! He makes me miserable!”
         She put her hands on her hips. “No, you think he’s going to make you miserable because you stereotype him with those bad Spirits you saw ages and ages ago!”
         “Denise changed that,” I argued. “You saw it! Why did she have to leave?”
         For some reason, that seemed to strike a nerve. “This is not about her – if she changed your mind so much, why are you behaving like this about Willard?”
         I was getting equally exasperated. “He’s not nice to me –”
         “Well no wonder, seeing as you kicked him in the face!”
         My jaw dropped. “That was an accident! If he hadn’t grabbed my ankle –”
         “There you go, blaming it on him again –”
         “If he hadn’t grabbed my ankle and made me jump, I wouldn’t have reacted like that,” I insisted, straining to keep civil. “Breach, Willard doesn’t realise when he’s upsetting people. He doesn’t know when to stop.”
         “No, you don’t know when people are joking.”
         I threw my hands up. “This is not about me not being able to take a joke!”
         “Isn’t it? Then perhaps it’s to do with what happened that year.”
         “Breach, stop it –”
         “You’re still scared, aren’t you?” she accused me. “You’re still scared and you’re taking it out on Willard – who may have been trying to make you like him!”
         My heart rate started to increase, and I started to feel choked. “Then he needs to go about that a different way, and this has nothing to do with that incident –”
         “Oh sure! Because it never affected your judgement of Spirits at all!”
         My eyes began to sting as I relived that day. “Breach,” I whispered, “please stop –”
         “No! You need to get over that, Jaimie. It was a year ago and it was one example of bad Spirits. You must have known they weren’t all like that – you must have known that stuff happened!”
         I blinked hard. “I did, but –”
         “So be reasonable!” she shouted. “Stop blaming Willard for what other Spirits have done –” The door opened, and her roommate Abigail stood there, watching us both awkwardly. My jaw was clenched as Breach turned back to me, her hazel eyes burning. “If you can’t deal with it, don’t bother coming at all,” she snapped, her tone harsh.
         “Fine,” I hissed back through my teeth. Avoiding meeting her eyes, I ducked my head and pushed past Abigail as I stormed to my own room. Scarlett was in class, so I had our place to myself. After slamming the door shut behind me though, I just… stood there, breathing heavily and struggling to see past a veil of tears that had sprung on me. I didn’t know if I was crying in anger or whether I was truly upset about what had just happened; part of me was furious with Breach for what she had said, the way she had continued the argument. Stop being unreasonable? She was being unreasonable! All I asked was that she didn’t call Willard out when we were back at hers – just this once. I’d never asked that before, and it wasn’t an unreasonable request! Why had she flown off at me like that? Why had she dragged my past into it?
         Fuming, I made my way over to my bed and slowly sat down on it. What did she mean I had to “get over” it? I was over it. Denise had helped me with that. Every other spirit I’d seen since, I had treated as a friendly soul. I’d never blamed Willard for that incident, and I wasn’t taking it out on him. I wasn’t to blame here. Was I? Surely if I’d just grown up a bit, I’d have been able to cope with Willard… perhaps even found him entertaining. Or would he just irritate me… I thought back to the time he’d pretended to fight me (a ‘one-sided match’). No – he would always irritate me; he resented me for kicking him, accidental or no. Damn him, I thought. If he was getting in the way of me and Breach being friends, then really he needed to go.
         That hit me then. Breach and I had fallen out. I’d never fallen out with anyone before. Not really anyway. Family is different to friends, and I stood the chance to lose a friend because of a Spirit – again. Suddenly feeling trapped within my walls, I rubbed my eyes and darted out into the corridor. It was mid-afternoon, and as I headed outside I was relieved to see there was almost no-one about. Moving quickly, I left the uni dorms behind, and headed for that dark overhang where the bins were kept.

Kyler was sat with his back against one of the bins as usual. I had come to realise that he didn’t change clothes, partly because they were the only clothes he had and partly because he liked the image. When I arrived, still on the verge of sobbing, he was frowning at an old-looking device, box-shaped and with a couple of dials down one side and an aerial. It was making a strange, fuzzy crackling noise, and he kept hitting it as he twisted one of the dials or wiggling the aerial. I watched him for about a minute, his lack of success amusing me a little. Eventually, it stopped making noises altogether. With a defeated sigh, he tossed it away. Then he spotted me.
         “Holy shit!” he breathed, visibly jumping. He pressed a hand to his chest. “How long have you been there?” I shrugged, hiding a small smile, and moved to sit next to him. Kyler watched me intently. “What’s up with you?” he asked.
         “Argument with a friend,” I mumbled. There was a pause.
         “Do you… want to talk about it?” The question was awkward, said out of need rather than care. Looking at his expression, I could tell he said it for my sake: I didn’t imagine Kyler had had many ‘friends’ to fall out with, so I doubted he’d be the one to talk to if I was upset about it. The relief on his face when I said “No” confirmed that thought.
         “What’s that?” I asked after several seconds, pointing to the noisy-now-silent box that lay a few feet away.
         He glanced at it. “It’s a radio.” I gave him a blank look and he grinned. “You’ve never seen a radio?”
         “Only in museums,” I admitted. “What were you trying to do with it?”
         “Get it to work.” He gestured above us at the ceiling of the alley. “I think this is interfering with any signal, though. Believe it or not, there are still radio stations out there, in hamlets and remote places.”
         “How do you know?”
         “Yesterday, I got a signal,” he said excitedly. “It was just some guys talking about random stuff, but it was entertaining enough. Then today when I tried: fuck all. Absolutely nothing.” He shook his head. “I was looking forward to the talk about pandas and all.” I laughed a little at that. This was why I had come here. Kyler had the ability to make me laugh, and I could easily use him to distract myself from anything going on. Bad coursework session? Go to Kyler. Lonely day? Go see Kyler. Upset about falling out with a friend? Find Kyler. Sometimes I had to wait a bit, but it was always worth it. He knew how to make people smile.
         “Your tattoo,” I said, properly looking at it for the first time in a while.
         He grinned crookedly. “Which one?”
         I prodded the one above his eyebrow. “That one. You said it was a gang tattoo.”
         He nodded. “I used to be in a gang. What about it?”
         “Exactly.” He raised the eyebrow, confused. I grinned. “Tell me about it.”
         “What, being in a gang?”
         “Yeah – like, why do you have to have a tattoo?”
         “So that other gangs know which gang you belong to.”
         “Isn’t that dangerous?”
         “How?”
         I thought about it, coming up with a scenario. “Say Billy’s in a gang, yeah? And his gang has a rival gang. If the rival gang sees Billy with his little gang tattoo, surely they’d just, like, kidnap him or something and do shit to him because they knew he was in a rival gang?”
         Kyler nodded. “It happens. I’ve had to move away from my gang’s area for similar reasons.”
         “You mean, you’re not from around here?”
         He shook his head. “No, I come from the Edge towns. That’s where the more prominent gangs operate.”
         I was fascinated. “What gang were you part of?”
         He seemed a little reluctant to answer. “The Blitzkriegers.”
         “Why did you leave?”
         Looking away, he drew his knees up, resting his arms on them as he fiddled with a stone. “I’d rather not talk about that.”
         Closing my mouth, I nodded. Kyler’s past was a tentative subject, one that he quickly closed up on if it came up in conversation. After vaguely wondering why he was clamming up this time, I decided to take a different angle on it. “What’s it a tattoo of, then?”
         He gave me a sly smile. “You know what blitzkrieg means, right?” I shook my head. “It means lightning war, apparently. I don’t know what language it is, though. We called ourselves the Blitzkriegers to, like, say that we fought with lightning. Sort of ‘lightning warriors’.” Kyler leaned closer to me, pointing to the design. “It’s a set of lightning bolts inside a sword – see?”
         The sword was smaller than my little finger, and the black lightning bolts along the blade were nothing more than teeny tiny little zigzags. Whoever had applied it was skilled to do a design that small, and though my knowledge of tattoos was limited, even a kid could have guessed it had been done illegally and painfully. “It’s cool,” I said.
         He pulled a face. “For a while, yeah. Then it gets infected, you have to get it touched up, people start avoiding you because of it – either that or they pull a punch on you. Eventually it just gets annoying. Something like a noose.”
         A noose that tied you down to the lifestyle that came with the tattoo. “You don’t miss it, then? Being part of a gang?”
         “No.” He shook his head. “It was rough – rougher than my life now. I’m glad I left.” There was a dark tone to his voice that I didn’t like, and his shiny blue eyes had become cold and hard as he stared at the opposite wall. I had a feeling I’d touched a particularly deep nerve, something that rarely happened with Kyler. Whatever I’d dug up though soon disappeared, and I spent a little more time with him before it started getting gloomy. My watch told me that the university would be finishing its lectures for the day.
         “Hey,” I said as I got up. “You want me to get you something to eat?”
         “That’s very kind of you, but no thank you,” he said with a gentlemanly smile. “I owe you too much already.”
         “It’s fine,” I insisted, but he refused to let me buy him anything. He practically ordered me not to. I decided then that I would have to buy a large dinner, one that would fill me up before I finished eating it all. Knowing Kyler, he wouldn’t object to that.
         Quickly heading back to the dorms, I was loathe to think once more of the recent argument I’d had. Having ignored it whilst with Kyler, I could now contemplate it with more clarity and steadiness. It still warped my mood, though, and by the time I made it to the second floor I was a bit upset again. I didn’t want to fall out with Breach; the only reason I hadn’t talked about it with Kyler was because I hadn’t trusted him to be able to give the right advice. Now, though, I knew someone who might be able to make things better.
         The problem with being deep in thought is that you aren’t really aware of everything going on around you. For example, you’re walking down a corridor and suddenly someone steps out of a door. You don’t see them until the last minute, and they don’t see you until you’re nose-deep in their bright green sweater. I blinked, startled. “Sorry, Glenn,” I mumbled. Now, believe it or not, Glenn does actually have different coloured jumpers besides green. I’ve rarely seen them myself, but it’s true. Just thought I’d put that out there.
         Glenn rubbed his chest. “It’s fine. I’m sorry too.” He had his bag slung over his shoulder to my delight. He stepped to the side and gestured into his place. “Rob’s inside.” I smiled and thanked him. Stepping through the door, I wasn’t surprised to see said boy glued to his computer screen, giant headphones on, a multitude of coloured bars tracking along the monitor. When they stopped moving, I gave a little cough to attract his attention.
         “Hey,” he said with a smile. He pulled off his headphones and came to greet me, giving me a hug as he kissed the top of my head. I hugged him back, feeling his warmth through his t-shirt and noting that, for someone as skinny as he was – and for a guy, he was fairly thin – he gave off a lot of heat. It made me hug him tighter. Observant as ever, he picked up on this. “You okay?”
         “Um…” You know when you plan out what you’re going to say to someone before you have to say it? You map out the entire conversation in your head, come up with every possible answer to every possible question and work out several ways of opening the topic. However, when it actually comes down to using one of these lines, all of them are utterly useless.
         Rob wriggled out of my arms and studied me. “You want to talk?”
         “Yeah.”
         Sat cross-legged on his bed, facing one another, Rob was the god of Patience as I gradually told him about my argument with Breach and all the confusion I was in once it was over. He didn’t interrupt, he didn’t switch focus, he just absently stroked my fingers, subtly calming me down in the way that only he could. When I stopped, he asked if I wanted advice, if there were any more details, how I was feeling now… Basically, he was amazing. Perhaps it’s the same with any relationship, but having talked to him about the whole thing, I was able to reach the decision to say sorry to Breach and join her and the others for the whole event. “But what if she doesn’t want me to go now?”
         He shrugged. “Then you give her some space. She’ll calm down eventually, and Scarlett and Laura are still your friends. They might talk to her as well.”
         A simple, straightforward answer, the one I had been looking for all afternoon. I smiled at him. “You have a habit of shrugging a lot, you know that?”
         He blinked at me. “Where did that come from?”
         “You shrugged. Again. I just noticed that you actually do it quite a lot.”
         “Oh.” He rubbed the back of his head. “You want me to stop?”
         I laughed. “No, no, I’m not saying that. It’s… I was just pointing it out, that’s all. You obviously hadn’t noticed.”
         “Obviously,” he said, shaking his head. “Hey. I’m starving – you want to get dinner?”
         I have had dinner with Rob in the past, when a group of us has gone to the canteen as a unit to catch up on the day’s events and listen to Scarlett’s gossip – but there was something special about having it with just Rob. Like, it wasn’t a date or anything, but it was Dinner With Rob. Something about that phrase made me go all gooey, and whatever worries I’d had were instantly jelly-fied. Grinning stupidly, I said “Sure,” and it was arranged. “Oh hey,” I said as we left. “You’ll never guess what: Sandra and Phil are back together again.” Scarlett or no Scarlett, nobody could have dinner without mentioning Sandra and Phil. Imagine that!

Scarlett set her tray down with a crash and plonked herself beside me, a worrying expression on her face. “You will not believe what I just found out.”
         So, Dinner With Rob: buy food, sit down to eat food, welcome the arrival of a very noisy friend who doesn’t realise they are interrupting Dinner With Rob. Damn. “What’s up?” I asked, not fully interested.
         “Sandra and Phil have split up.”
         Choking on pasta is also included in the Dinner With Rob scenario, it would seem. “What?” I squeaked. “But they just got back together again!”
         “Yeah,” she said, giving me the ‘get-with-it-already’ look, “but that was before the rumours were proved true.”
         “What rumours?”
         “The rumour that, whilst they were breaking up, Phil was having it on with Sandra’s bezzie: Ellie. They both denied, of course, especially Ellie ‘cause she and Sandra had made this pact or something never to hurt the other one or stab each other in the back. So until about an hour ago, yeah, that was just a rumour – but it turns out it’s true, because some genius somewhere has done a bit of… ‘digging’, shall we say, and they got into Phil’s mail. But not just Phil’s mail – also the security camera files! There’s no way Phil can deny mail and video footage.”
         I stared at her, jaw on the floor. “Why not?”
         She leaned closer, dropping her voice. “Well, there are a lot of messages to Ellie regarding the break up, and they include some pretty, uh, ‘suggestive’ phrases in them, if you get me. Then the video footage is of them actually…” Scarlett then felt the need to imitate what the video showed us. If it really looked anything like she… demonstrated, then oh dear. That’s really all I can say.
         I shook my head in despair. “I just don’t get it. What is with those two?”
         “You mean three,” Rob corrected me in mock seriousness.
         “People say Sandra’s a drama queen,” Scarlett said.
         “Really? Where do they get that idea from,” I muttered. Rob smirked.
         “Anyway – how have you two been?” she crooned, waving her fork at us both.
         We gave each other blank looks. “Fine,” he said. “You?” I guess we weren’t telling her about how she interrupted Dinner With Rob.
         “Crazy!” she said. “Aside from all this gossip, my art course is really kicking off now. Get this: we actually have to make our own mini-exhibition!”
         “Cool – can we see it?” I asked.
         “Not until it’s done!”
         “Uh, that’s kind of what I meant.”
         “Oh, right.” Scarlett then spotted something over Rob’s shoulder and pointed excitedly. “Hey look, there’s Matt – oh, Laura will be packing, won’t she?” Without warning, she stood up and started jumping up and down, waving her arms wildly. “Matt! Hey, Matt! Over here!”
         As I ducked to avoid being clobbered, Rob told Scarlett, “You might want a flashing light and a foghorn, you know.”
         This boy has developed a habit of making me laugh at awkward moments; take now, for instance: the classic ‘I’m-drinking-so-don’t-make-me-laugh’ situation. Yes, Joos ended up in my perfectly nice pasta, and I was choking for the second time in the space of five minutes. Scarlett – who thankfully hadn’t heard the comment – stared at me like I was having a fit. And Rob? My boyfriend? He laughed, like any dutiful boyfriend would. By the time Matt arrived, the two of us were a little dizzy from laughing at one another and Scarlett, who had just sat there watching us in utter confusion.
         “What did I miss?” he asked, sitting next to Rob.
         Scarlett held up her hands. “Not a clue.”
         “It probably wasn’t that funny really,” I said, still struggling not to giggle.
         “Oh, was it a couple’s thing?” Scarlett said. “That makes a bit more sense.” Didn’t stop her from making a ‘crazy’ gesture anyway.
         “Does Laura need any help with her packing, Matt?” I asked him.
         “I don’t know. I was actually going to suggest we pop over sometime and lend a hand, but I’m not sure when she’s going.”
         “Well it’s not in the next few days is it?”
         He shook his head. “I think… four days from now? Maybe five –”
         “That’s perfect!”
         We all turned to Scarlett, confused and a little worried. “What’s perfect?” asked Matt warily.
         “In three days, that restaurant’s doing a four-dish deal thing!” she babbled excitedly, waving her hands in front of her face. “You know – it’s… oh!”
         “Reilly’s?”
         “No.”
         “Happy Gremlin?”
         “No!”
         “Tasty Memories?”
         “What? No, no, it’s that really decent place…”
         “We Say Gourmay?”
         “Yes!” she cried, nearly jabbing my eye out as she pointed happily at me. “That’s it! We Say Gourmay is doing this deal, right? You get four dishes of any price but it only costs about twenty or so for everyone, regardless of how much the dish costs. Oh, and excluding drinks, of course.”
         Matt frowned at us. “So, what are you getting at, Scarl?”
         She pointed at Rob and me. “You two, should go on a double date with those two!” Matt represented himself and Laura. Scarlett beamed. “How good would that be? Just you four, two couples, hanging out – and dead cheap, too!”
         Matt smiled. “That actually sounds okay.” He looked at me and Rob expectantly. Scarlett practically laser-beamed us.
         Glancing at Rob, I imagined what a telepathic conversation between us would sound like…
         A double date? Really?
         You never know, it might be fun.
         It might be awkward.
         It’s Matt and Laura. How long have you known Matt now?
         I know, but –
         Come on, please? We can hardly say no. It’d be mean!
         Alright, then.          
         “Sure, we’re game,” I said, sneaking another quick glance at Rob for confirmation (just in case I imagined it wrong and actually, he really didn’t want to go).
         “Great,” Matt said. “I’ll tell Laura next time I see her.”
         “Ah – already on it!” Scarlett’s fingers were busy relaying the message to our absent friend, and I wondered if messaging was how she found out so much about Sandra and Phil. And Ellie.
         He raised his eyebrows. “Of course. I forgot there’s no need to wait when Scarlett, Queen of Gossip is on hand.”
         She smiled at him as she put her phone away. “Oh! Hey Matt – did you know Sandra and Phil have broken up again?”
         He groaned. “I couldn’t care less.”
         And that was how my first ever double date was organised. I’ll admit, I was nervous about it later; Rob and I hadn’t even been on one date alone together, yet we’d somehow ended up going on one with long-term couple Matt and Laura, who – let’s be honest – were a lot more expressive about their love than we were. I think that’s what made Rob nervous. It certainly made me apprehensive, but I figured we’d find a way to distract ourselves if they did get too cuddly. After thinking about it as I was falling asleep, though (and by that I mean dreaming out several different versions of the double date), I was rather excited about it. I just had to wait three days. No biggy – what could happen in three days?