ID 236270372 | Pink Wand © Chernetskaya | Dreamstime.com
“Magic Menace Mode activated!” I whispered with force.
“What are you doing Jennie?” Deborah who sits in the seat next to me asked.
My palms tingled from holding my fists tightly. “Shh. I just want out of here,” I said as I opened them up and shook them out.
“Don’t we all?” Deborah used her stylist to scratch down the next day’s reading assignment, or to doodle. It really didn’t really matter which.
The class was bullshit, put together by the overlords of the odious. Whitewashed lies unusable in the futurescape of the blinking minutes of mankind. History, math, English, science. None of it matters when computers will read, think, and create for us. Even voting isn’t going to be a thing much longer. Everyone knew that.
But if Magic worked, the rules would change. Imagine everyone with purple skin. Try to pick out people-of-color for target practice when colors vary for lilac to royal! Would light or dark became the new focus?
I recorded the three chapters to read tonight and the fifteen questions we were to turn in and flipped the notebook cover close on the flatscreen. Three minutes left in class before bell. Then I had newspaper, which no one read, lacrosse which no one came out for, and a musical practice, where no one sang on key but the parents will sing praises of. I could slip in the reading somewhere in there; my tablet had enough charge to pull that off.
I waited for the classroom to empty, the teacher darting out first to make it to the parent lines. Another stupidity. No buses to save tax money; instead all the parents left work early and waiting in long lines with engines running, angry at the wait. That wasn’t saving time, money, resources, or anyone’s sanity. Slinging my bag over my shoulder, I made my way to the newspaper room.
Bill was waiting for me; he lost his key the second day.
Him losing the key was a ritual. Every year since sixth grade all of us news nerds would get a key, he would lose his between the first and fifth day. As a freshman, he managed it without even leaving the room. Then Meghan would misplace hers sometimes around Christmas, and finally Chris sometime in March. I was the keykeeper for the group by default.
“S’up.” Bill followed me in the room, before bearing off to head toward the graphics computer to download the pictures he had taken today and see if any of the ones other kid emailed in were usable by administration rules. “Meg working today?”
“Fast food. She left last period.”
“It’s gonna hurt when she graduates this year.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” I booted up the ancient monster we use for article assembly and formatting, and did a quick scan of the articles Chris approved for Friday’s publication. It was his quarter as editor-in-chief, a job that bounced between him and me and one of the freshmen we were training up to take over when the Junior crew graduated; Meghan had pushed four years of schooling into three years by attending college courses over the summer. Chris did most of his work during lunch now that basketball season was at its height.
After twenty minutes of quiet clicking, me doing a lot of format tweaking, we both sighed. Mine was because of the ancient software which thought if you moved something one line it needed to pop it over fifteen points had finally agreed to fit everything but the last page into the space needed. It took a delicate hand and earned me the prize of grand wizard at the party before winter break. The group bought me a wand for my Hogwarts and Kane Chronicle obsessions. Bill’s sigh was because he had finished flipping through the pictures from the week and had flagged the ones for me to put in our “This Week at Washington Wigwam” back-page spread.
“Ten minutes until practice.” I said before I picked up the plastic monstrosity of a wand they had given me, with its humongous pale pink gem and silver foil decorations, and started waving it around randomly.
Bill rotated his neck, cracking it loud enough I worried he had broken his spine for a moment. “MUN wants to do an all-day special practice Saturday and my Boy Scout troop has a fundraiser and I can’t decide which to go to or would look better for the college applications I’m filling out.”
The newsroom was full of overachievers, from Bill’s Model United Nations, Eagle Scout, and track commitments to Meg three advanced college credit courses plus two part-time jobs. Some days I felt like the lost cause; my family didn’t have college funds, so unless someone would offer me a free ride including a way to get to university and back and housing and food, it was the salt trenches for me after graduation next year. My present virtual job editing (and writing, shh, if you pay enough) essays for high school students wasn’t much for resume fodder, especially with AI muscling into my territory so strongly this past year.
“Maybe I could wave this wand and you and I could get an extra $100.” I shook the plastic toy, the tinsel tassel shushing with movement.
“Make if five hundred and I will be able to dodge the fundraiser.”
I smiled at him, rotating the chair to face him. “Deal, you wish really hard now.”
He laughed and put both his hands alongside his head and scrunched his face, closing his eyes. “Go!”
“Abracadabra.” I circled the wand over the floor, and then flicked it over the center of the area I had delineated. “Bammo!”
I inhaled sharply.
“Did it work?” Bill asked jokingly, then opened his eyes to discover it had indeed worked.
Stacked on the floor were four neat bundles of five dollars, each strapped together in red bands indicating a hundred bills in each pack.
“I think that is a little more than we asked for,” he muttered.
“To be fair, all three of you bought me the wand, so I guess the extra two are for Meghan and Chris.”
“Want to try that again?” he glanced up at me. “Ten thousand would get me a car.”
“No, no.” I shook my head, staring down at the windfall. “Not today.”
(words 1,061; first published 1/25/2026)