Marjorie Diaz's Unfortunate Introduction to Magical High Society

She's an Ingenue

The second week of classes was somehow worse than the first. Marjorie kept waiting for the other shoe to drop with Patrick. Between his sarcastic smiles and witty remarks every time they were even in the vicinity of one another, she was weak. Which, of course, meant Lucian teased her relentlessly.

She tried not to talk about him at home, she really did, but she couldn't help it. His name kept coming up like word vomit and every single time she mentioned him, Lucian's lips would twist into a knowing smile and it made Marjorie sick.

"He's funny," Marjorie said, standing at the stove and painstakingly making enchiladas for both her and Lucian. "And not just fuck boy funny, that's something that surprised me."

"Uh huh," Lucian said, sitting at the island in the middle of their kitchen, still working on her nightly reading.

"He's smarter than I thought too," Marjorie said, debating on whether or not it was too late to cut out her tongue so she could stop herself from talking. She could literally hear Lucian getting bored and more frustrated with every single utterance of his name.

"That's good," Lucian said, her brow furrowed as she tried to focus on her work.

"I'm actually starting to like the project we're working on," Marjorie said, trying to change the subject to something more academic so she could avoid talking about Patrick directly. "The strategies were only one small part of it. It's actually this whole long thing--"

"That's what a senior project is," Lucian interjected, glancing up from her textbook to smirk at Marjorie.

Marjorie huffed. "Of course, I knew that, but I'm starting to get into it now, at least. Considering there haven't been any other..." she trailed off for a moment, shoulders tense. "Incidents."

Since the past Wednesday when Patrick called her out in front of her entire class for their strategies being bullshit, the two of them had, at least, tried to get along. They still hadn't exchanged numbers, but she found contacting him over email to be simple enough. She didn't need his number anyways. Not when she couldn't seem to shut the fuck up about him for longer than a few minutes.

"That's good," Lucian said again, turning back down toward her text book.

"Do you want anything to drink or a snack or something before I put these bad boys in the oven?" Marjorie asked.

"Nah," Lucian responded. "Excited to finally be done with this reading so I can eat something, though." She stretched, cracking her back. "I don't know why I decided to take 23 credits in my last semester, but nobody ever said I was smart."

"I did question your sanity when you told me about this last year after advising. You don't really need all those extra courses. Weren't you only 9 credits shy of your degree?" Marjorie asked, opening the oven and slipping the enchiladas inside.

Lucian shrugged. "I wanted to get a headstart on grad school, I guess."

Marjorie turned, leaning against the warm front of their stove. She narrowed her eyes. "Are you even going to grad school? Can't you get, like, any job with a computer science degree right out of university or something? We could move to California, even. Live in the bay area and pay an asston in rent for a subpar city--"

"Gross. I don't want to live in California. What's wrong with New York? There's tons of startups and fancy companies here." Lucian said, reading momentarily forgotten.

Marjorie shrugged. "For one, it's cold as heck. Plus, I've always liked the idea of starting over on the west coast. Isn't that what people our age do? You could go to grad school at Berkeley. Don't they have a great computer science program or something?"