Chapter Fifteen
Working on the Basics

Jenna kneeled down in front of Emily after class and put her hand on his head, covering his eyes and taking away his ability to see, but her words of encouragement and excitement also largely got rid of his desire to really worry about it. She ruffled his hair for a bit, and then the soft pets were gone. Oh well. 

“Hey, Emily, I had a really good first class with you!” she said. “I have to go to the Witch’s Cottage now.” Jenna pointed behind her to a large-ish building on the edge of the little village. “It’s the girls’ dormitories,” she added with a chuckle. “Well, for girl witches. If you go to the cafeteria and then turn around and go straight ahead until you bump into a large house with a red door and a red chimney, that’s the familiar house, and then they’ll tell you where you’ll be staying. Okay?”

“Um,” Emily said. “Okay. It was very nice to meet you, Jenna. Do we need to meet up tomorrow or something?” Jenna nodded. 

“The pages you got in class also have some introductory stuff on them. Where you need to be and stuff.” She covered her mouth when she smiled impishly. “You can read them when you have thumbs again. I’m sorry, was that inconsiderate?”

“Not at all,” Emily said with a little giggle even he would’ve had to admit was very cute. “Thank you again for your help!” He shifted his weight a little. At the end of class, Miss Falls had given every one of the Familiars something that would allow them to carry their homework. There had been a whole backroom with all kinds of apparatuses for all kinds of different animals. Emily had been fitted with a little harness with a tube on the back, his homework rolled up inside. 

“Of course,” she said. “It looks very cute on you,” she added. “Like a proper housekitty. Okay, I gotta go!” She ran off, only progressed about five feet, skidded to a halt, and spun around. “It-was-nice-to-make-your-acquaintance,” she said almost robotically. “Okay bye!” And she was gone, leaving a nonplussed Emily sitting in the gravel. 

He shook his head, and then saw Simon bouncing through the grass just a little bit away, and his own Wizard walking away. The little ferret had also been fitted with a harness, but seemed to be having some trouble lugging the tube around. It wasn’t so much the weight by the looks of it, but the bulkiness of it. Emily carefully tiptoed up to him, grateful for the little footpads that allowed him to move around so quietly, and grabbed the back of the harness with his teeth. Simon growled in surprise, then spun around, his little ferret face pressed almost nose to nose with Emily. He glared. 

“You,” he said. “You monster.”

“Hehehe,” Emily said, which was all he could manage with a mouthful of harnessed ferret. He carried Simon over the building with the red door and the red chimney, like Jenna had indicated. There was a doggy door, and, he noticed, several further openings in the wall at various heights for various kinds of animals. At least they were being accommodating. He used Simon’s face to push the dog flap open and hopped inside, only slightly getting his harness caught on the edges. Once inside, he became acutely aware of the lack of pressure to be a cat. Maybe it was the building, but he realized he could turn back.

He put Simon down. There were several dozen people around, most of them in their human form. He did too. It made sense to stretch his legs. The floor jumped away quickly and every distance suddenly became less far. If he reached up, he could easily touch the low ceiling. Simon did the same thing and stretched out next to him, and then looked at him. 

“So… Emily, huh?” he said, then grinned and slapped him on the shoulder. “C’mon, let’s do that homework. Hey Sarah!” he waved as he approached the girl sitting at the table. Emily… well, now Jonathan again, followed him sheepishly. That was going to take some explaining. He noticed that he and Simon were wearing normal backpacks now. That was interesting, at least. He sat down on Sarah’s other side and opened the backpack. The tube was inside. He held it up curiously. 

“Hey you two,” Sarah said, “oh, yeah, be careful with that. Changing back and forth can really crumple up your papers unless you keep them in that tube. How was your first class?”

“It went well!” Simon said excitedly. “We got a literal, actual, physical ton of homework.” He got the papers out of his own tube, somehow already slightly messy. In Simon’s hands, any piece of paper was left cat-, dog- and possibly even cow-eared. “Oh, wait, this is more initiation stuff.” He put the first sheet to the side. “It’s about the dormitories and lunch breaks and stuff. Okay, cool, this page I like.” He threw the rest of the pages down. All around them, other first years were also dealing with their own bundles. “Sarah, why didn’t you warn me about this?” He folded his hands dramatically and gave her a concerned look. 

“I just didn’t want you to worry about your first day of school,” she shrugged. “Besides, we’re not supposed to tell people because you’re not supposed to study for it.” She held up the bag next to her chair. “Your rucksack should have some stationary inside it, by the way.” She continued while Simon and Jonathan rummaged through their packs. “Just fill out as much as you can, as quickly as you can. It’s like an aptitude test to see what you need brushing up on.”

“How much of this is going to be important?” Jonathan asked as he leafed through it. There were chemical formulas on page seven. Page fifteen had a diagram of a human skeleton. He was going to scream. 

“Only some of it. You need a middle-school education just in case,” Sarah said, “but you’ll probably not need most of it. Magic changes things, you know? But the School wants you to have the option of stepping away and going to a normal college if you ultimately decide to.”

“Mm-hmm,” Simon said. “I died, got turned into a ferret, and all I got was this lousy diploma?” He retrieved a pen and immediately started to chew on it. “At least the starting part is easy. Two. Plus. Three. Is. Five.” 

“They really need to make sure you have the basics down,” Sarah said. “Flip the page.” They both did as she said. 

“I’m upset,” Simon said matter-of-factly. “I’m upset and I’m going to start throwing things.”

“Please don’t,” Jonathan chuckled. “You’ve never seen the Sigma operator?”

“Sigma ba—” Simon started. Sarah hit him in the head with an eraser, he turned back into a ferret and fell off his chair with a loud Thunk. “Anyway, you should ask Jonathan about Emily,” he said as he turned back, climbing back up. 

“Oh?” Sarah asked, “who’s Emily? New classmate?”

“You could say that,” Simon said, eyebrows raised at Jonathan. “Do you wanna…?”

Jonathan rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Fine,” he said. “Okay, so Jenna apparently knows stuff about cats, because she immediately realized that my cat-form was a girl cat.” He paused for a moment, absent-mindedly filling out the easiest of the mathematical equations on the page in front of him. “Jenna is my Witch, by the way. Anyway, she realized that, and then she asked if she could call me Emily because, and I quote ‘I look like an Emily’, and she looks like she’s had it really rough with her parents so I didn’t want to try and explain why a girl cat would be called Jonathan, so when I’m a cat I guess I’m Emily.” Sarah shot him a questioning glance. 

“She also didn’t want to let go of her parents?” she asked, glancing sideways at Dennis, who was doing his own homework with his tongue between his teeth and a big frown of concentration on his forehead, the next table over. 

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“Um, no,” Jonathan said. “Something about her parents ‘not believing her when she said she was a girl’. Not sure what that was about but I think they kicked her out.”

“Oh,” Sarah said, and she grew quiet. Simon too blinked a few times. Jonathan looked between them. 

“What? I feel like I’m missing something.” 

“She’s probably transgender, Jonathan,” Simon said. “You’ve never heard of trans people before?” Jonathan shook his head. “Wait, really? Like, they’re all over the news these days. Trans rights, and all that?”

“Um,” Jonathan said, blushing slightly, “I don’t… wasn’t… really… allowed to watch…” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Anyway, let’s just move on. What are trans people?”

“Well, it’s kinda like Jenna told you,” Sarah said. “People who look like boys but are really girls on the inside.”

“Or the other way around,” Simon said, pointing. “I think. Maybe they’re called something else. Anyway, they take medication and stuff — please don’t ask me what stuff — to help them look like who they really are. Wait…” He looked at Sarah. “If he turns into a girl cat…”

“Nah,” Jonathan said, crossing his arms. “I can’t be trans, because that would mean I’d be a girl, and I can’t be a girl. Anyway, I didn’t know that about Jenny.” The two of them looked at him. “What?”

“Well, doesn’t that… I don’t know… people usually have a response to that, you know? Like, you’re paired up with her. It doesn’t bother you?” Sarah asked. 

Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t know why it should. I think it’s really cool she can be who she really is or whatever. She looks like she’s pretty happy, too. I didn’t even know you could do that.” He shifted in his seat. “It makes sense, if I can turn into a cat, but you know… people figuring themselves out, and actually getting to be themselves? That’s… yeah, that’s pretty freaking cool.” He shifted again, frowning, thinking about it. Something about it didn’t sit well with him. Not Jenna specifically. Like there was an itch in the back of his head he couldn’t scratch. But then again, what was and what wasn’t possible had been slowly turned on its head in the past few weeks, maybe he just needed some time to adjust to the idea. 

“One thing I’m wondering about,” Sarah said, “is why you two got paired up.”

“Hmm?” Jonathan asked. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Simon said, “that is weird.” He chewed on the back of his pen. “I mean, Sarah’s got Leah, I’ve got Ben. It’s funny that your Warlock is a girl.”

“Maybe it’s because I turn into a girl cat,” Jonathan said with a shrug. “That would make sense, right?” Sarah gave him a side-eye, but he shrugged it off. “Take a picture,” he said, sticking his tongue out. “It’ll last longer.”

“Okay,” she said, and whipped out her phone. He was still seeing spots when Simon looked over Sarah’s shoulder to look at the picture. 

“How dare you,” Jonathan said, rubbing his eyes. “I didn’t mean take an actual—”

“Oh, hey, this one’s cute,” Simon said. “You really captured his startled-cat look.”

“I know, right?” Sarah said. “He really is very cute. You know, when he looks like that.” The two of them laughed, but a flustered Jonathan caught her smiling at him over the phone. 

“How’d you even get a phone here, anyway?” he asked, changing the subject very subtly and inconspicuously. 

“In… in my pocket?” Sarah said. “Like, there’s no reception here, but it’s not like we’ve got some kind of anti-technology field or anything. That would be ridiculous. Didn’t you bring your phone with you?”

Jonathan shook his head. “I’ve never had one. Parents didn’t seeS the point. And I didn’t bring my pager with me to school.”

“Your what?!” Simon said, turning into a ferret and flopping onto the table, doing a war dance. “Oh my God I didn’t know you were so old.” 

“C’mere you!” Jonathan said, turning back into Emily. Simon did a dramatic swan-dive-turned-belly-flop off the table as Emily chased him, both of them laughing loudly as they did. Even Dennis looked up from his notes to giggle along, and quickly, the entire dorm was cheering them on. It felt good to be a cat, even as a girl, chasing a hysterically giggling ferret around the room. 

It was weird. He’d expected to feel out of place at school. But, just like in the Familiar House, this, too, felt a little bit like home.