The Arcane Arts

ELLSBETH

Ellsbeth tried to blend in among the throng of undergraduates waiting outside the lecture hall for the locked doors to open. It was a few minutes before seven in the morning—the single class that Professor Rawlins offered to undergraduates was set, seemingly purposefully, punishingly early, and still, Introduction to the Principles of Arcane Mechanicals was the most sought-after class on Newlyn’s campus. You could practically hear the frantic clicking through the freshman dorms when the online registration system opened, the frenetic attempts to claim one of the sixty seats. Rawlins did not permit students to audit the class, and there was no waitlist.

It was well understood that T. M. Rawlins believed a lecture for freshmen to be a waste of his time. He was a professor at Newlyn, of course, because of its famous graduate program in the arcane arts, with its handpicked cohort of eight students. Ellsbeth imagined that Rawlins only taught the one undergraduate lecture he did because it was some contractual obligation of his tenure, or else the dean of the College of the Arcane Arts had some blackmail on him.

The September morning was cold enough that her breath was visible, and Ellsbeth stepped out of the shadow of a red-brick building to try to claim whatever faint warmth she could from the watery sunlight. She pulsed her hands into fists in her pockets to try to get the blood flowing as she eyed the undergraduates around her. They were happily chattering in groups of twos and threes, their voices too high from excitement and the falseness of trying to impress people they were just meeting for the first time. Some wore new peacoats and too much perfume, and full faces of makeup masking teenage acne; others were studiedly casual, in filthy sneakers and baseball hats and the same backpack they’d used in high school slung over one shoulder, daring the world to believe that even for a moment they cared what anyone else thought. They were all halfway caught between arrogance and insecurity, still energized by the promise of an imagined reinvention upon matriculating to college—the chance to shed their insufferably suburban high school identities—and still buoyed by their good luck at having managed to secure a spot in Rawlins’s coveted lecture and at being eighteen, and being at Newlyn, and knowing everything.

Ellsbeth was twenty-four years old and she had never felt so old as she did then, standing among a horde of college freshmen. She was not registered for Introduction to the Principles of Arcane Mechanicals. In fact, she was not a student at Newlyn University at all.

One of the peacoat girls standing nearby was holding a copy of The Arcane and the Ordinary clutched against her chest, as if she was going to ask Professor Rawlins to sign it for her after class. His author photo took up almost the entire back cover, and Ellsbeth found herself staring at it.

Rawlins was young in the picture—probably, infuriatingly, in his twenties—with a swoop of brown hair. Even in the black and white, Ellsbeth could make out blue eyes. He wasn’t smiling. Perhaps he had thought that was too casual for a dense book of nonfiction, a work (as The New York Times Book Review promised in large letters) “of tremendous importance to the field.” Instead, this black-and-white Rawlins was tilting his head back, gazing out at the viewer down his nose. Ellsbeth imagined him practicing the expression in the mirror, hoping to look serious, imperious even. Instead, something about the pose made her smile. He looked like a little boy playing grown-up in an Oxford shirt.

Just as the bell in the tower struck the hour, the heavy mechanical sounds of a lock being undone were audible from the outside, and a TA swung the heavy doors of Hale Hall open. The eager bodies pressed forward in a flood, Ellsbeth among them.

•

The College of the Arcane Arts at Newlyn was almost its own university within the university, with a cluster of buildings on the west side of campus curled around a grassy courtyard like a dragon around its hoard. Hale Hall took up nearly one entire side of the quad, a stately granite-and-brownstone structure with a striped roof that peaked in a gothic point and tall, narrow windows.

The Practicum, for graduate students, was across the way, behind a small thicket of heritage elm trees. It had no windows at all.

Though Newlyn University had a respectable reputation as an undergraduate school, it was home to one of the most elite graduate programs for arcane arts in the world—certainly the best program in the United States, next to Yale.

Bertie had been trying to convince Ellsbeth of that when they were back home for Thanksgiving last year. It was after Ellsbeth had graduated from St. Andrews, but she had decided to stay in the UK for another year to study for her Arcanus. Bertie had recently begun her first semester as an undergraduate at Newlyn and they were both back in New Jersey to spend a week half-heartedly forking at their mother’s latest attempt at a fat-free turkey loaf and watching network television with their dad before he fell asleep on the couch.

“You’d love the trees on campus,” Bertie had said, flopping onto Ellsbeth’s childhood bed. “The red and orange leaves. It’s like something out of a J. Crew catalog. So Vermont-y. Makes you want to drink maple syrup.”

“I’m not getting my DAA in arcane mechanicals because I want to look at trees,” Ellsbeth said.

“Well, obviously,” Bertie shot back, grinning. “But if you went to Newlyn next year, we could room together. They let sophomores live off-campus. You and I could get an apartment!” That did appeal to Ellsbeth. While she left for St. Andrews in Scotland, she found she didn’t miss her mother or father nearly as much as she missed her younger sister. Every time she visited home again, Bertie shocked her anew with just how much of a person she had become since she last saw her. No longer a child, the little sibling made anonymous by the four years in between them, but an actual person full of wit and passion and opinions and a surprisingly sharp sense of humor.

The idea of living in an apartment tucked on a tree-lined street near Newlyn with Bertie, boiling water for tea together and studying side by side on the couch, made Ellsbeth smile. “It’s a thought,” she said. Bertie rolled her eyes. Both of them knew that Ellsbeth was planning on getting her DAA in the arcane mechanicals at Cambridge. Her undergraduate adviser had already reached out to the dean of Trinity College, a friend of his, and informed him that Ellsbeth was the most promising arcanist he had ever taught. Her slot in the program was a foregone conclusion, merely waiting on Ellsbeth taking the Arcanus.

Because you were only permitted to sit for the Arcanus once, most students, like Ellsbeth, took a few months off after graduation to study before taking the test in January. Cambridge required at least a fifty-five out of seventy-one on the Arcanus for admission to its DAA program; Ellsbeth had taken three practice tests so far, and received a perfect score every time.

Bertie reached over to pull Ellsbeth’s old paperback copy of The Arcane and the Ordinary off her bedside table. “The guy who wrote this teaches at Newlyn.”

“How do you know? Last I heard, you’re studying French. And dance.”

“He’s famous,” Bertie said, thumbing through the book. “Or he was. They brag about it in the school brochures and stuff. Come on. It’s cool that he’s at Newlyn.”

“I mean, sure,” Ellsbeth said, “But I’m pretty sure he went to Cambridge.” Bertie flipped to the back of the book for an About the Author section which she read silently, then scowled and threw the book down onto the bed beside her.

Had Bertie been so insistent on getting Ellsbeth to join her at Newlyn because she was lonely? Because she needed her sister? There were so many moments that Ellsbeth replayed in her mind, trying to make sense of what happened. It was like trying to complete a puzzle, but the pieces were soggy and torn and dissolving in her hands.

In the end, Ellsbeth had not gone to Cambridge. Ellsbeth had sat for her one and only Arcanus that winter, and she had failed, destroying any possible future she would ever have as an arcanist, the only thing she had ever wanted to be. And when she flew home to New Jersey the next time, Bertie wasn’t there. Her clothes were sealed in vacuum-packed plastic and her bedroom door remained shut.