Time to Get to Work
Amity’s POV
Amity’s knee bounced up and down as she waited in the lobby. It was Thursday and she had just finished her last final. Luz hadn’t shown up all week.
She, Willow, and Gus had spent every spare moment that they weren’t studying trying to reach her but she hadn’t responded to any of their messages. Willow even tried using one of their old chat rooms that hadn’t been shut down but none of them had gotten anywhere. Amity had talked to a few teachers about where Luz was, Mr. Bump had said she was out sick and Vice Principal Clawthorn had said that it was a private matter but none of the information was useful to her.
Amity frowned, she didn’t know of any other teachers she could ask that Willow or Gus hadn’t tried, but there was one other person who might be able to help. Amity checked her phone, the rest of the school had already cleared out to the buses but she still had a while until her siblings came to pick her up. Glancing outside at the miserably cold weather, she set her jaw and drew her coat tighter before marching outside.
It took a lot longer to walk to Eda’s shop than it took to ride on the back of Luz’s bike. By the time she slipped through the door of The Owl House she could no longer feel her toes and was shivering so hard she was probably giving herself some mild brain damage. The bell on the door announced Amity’s entrance as she took a few steps into the cluttered mess of Eda’s shop but no one was in the shop to greet her. Amity’s gaze drifted over to the door to the back room. Would it be alright for her to go back there to find Eda herself? She’d been back there twice a week since the second month of school so she knew her way around Eda’s house somewhat but it felt wrong to go back there without Luz.
Before she could bring herself to do anything, the staff door opened and Amity sprung to attention as Eda stepped onto the shop floor. The older woman blinked like she wasn’t expecting to see Amity. “Oh, it’s you,” she said, shutting the door gently behind her and approaching the main counter.
“Have you heard from Luz?” Amity asked, immediately stepping up to the counter as well.
Eda looked down at her hands. If Amity didn’t know better, she could have sworn the woman’s usually prideful expression was now something more akin to shame. “Uh, yeah, I’ve talked to her. She got a bit sick after the dance, something about-” she coughed into her hand guiltily, “walking a few miles home in freezing temperatures and wet hair.”
Amity felt the blood drain from her face. This was her fault, if she’d just come clean sooner instead of lying and… She shook her head. “Has she told you anything about…” Amity trailed off trying to find the right thing to say.
“She’s told me some things.” Eda started fiddling with some piece of junk on the counter. “Not everything though, she won’t say who did this only that it wasn’t you or the other two. She’s doing better now, I gave her some sick time and she’s been working on her finals from home thanks to what I heard was a very persuasive conversation with her mother. Probably really similar to the one she and I had last weekend.” The older woman sighed, defeated, “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about what happened to her right?”
Amity shifted uncomfortably, her freezing clothes clung uncomfortably to body and felt like she was being strangled by an ice-cold grip. Amity had wanted to tell someone exactly what had happened right away but Willow and Gus had talked her out of it. Similar things have been tried in the past with less than satisfactory results and in the end they agreed that if Luz came forward they would too but in the end it would be Amity and three nobodies going against three of the school’s star athletes who probably had a dozen teammates willing to spout whatever alibi they’d agree on. It just wasn’t smart. She shook her head solemnly.
Amity took a breath and shivered, both from the thought and from the cold currently seeping into her bones. Eda had once offered her and Luz some old sweatshirts after they’d ridden through the rain but the woman gave no indication that the same offer would be extended here. In fact, Amity had the distinct feeling that, though Eda wasn’t going to kick her out, she wasn’t quite welcome in The Owl House at that moment. Amity nodded her head slowly, “If you see her, please tell her to call me.” She hoped that Eda could sense the desperation in her voice.
“Sure, kid.”
Amity gave the staff door one last glance before turning and heading out of the shop. Hooty started his screeching right as the door shut behind her and Amity could hear Eda shouting at it to shut up before the wind drowned the noise out.
She sniffled from the cold. Maybe there was a coffee place she could hunker down in until her siblings got out of class.
Luz’s POV
Luz sat with her legs tucked against her chest. The glare from her computer screen illuminated her room. With the clouds and daylight savings time making it get darker earlier she hadn’t even noticed how late it was getting.
Previously she’s been practically unconscious for about four days only really pulling through when she woke up at 2am on Wednesday morning. She was still bruised and aching to all hell but her mom had come home an hour later to her making something to eat and they’d sat down to talk some things through. Maybe Luz should have told her that it was Boscha and the other two girls, but she’d been in situations like this one before. Luz’s DNA was the only evidence and it was probably already cleaned up by an unlucky janitor. It would end up turning into her word against theirs and the most that would come of it would be them doing something even worse to her off of school grounds for snitching.
With a sigh, Luz sent the email with her last final attached. Her mom had somehow managed to convince the vice principal into having her teachers convert the normal tests into a take home format or have her write a paper instead. Some of the new things she needed to do were supposed to be more difficult since she technically had an extra week to get them in as well, but Luz really didn’t need the extra time. She was so used to having The Boiling Isles on top of homework on top of work on top of school that, now that she didn’t have any of it, there was nothing else for her to do than complete her finals.
A chime rang out from her computer and Luz glanced at the flag in the corner of her screen. Salix, no, Willow was trying to message her over discord again. Luz’s stomach lurched and she shut the computer screen, sending the room into full darkness as she tried to breath past the feeling twisting in her gut.
She’d known. They’d all known and they said nothing.
Amity said nothing.
Luz gripped the edge of her desk. She didn’t want to think about this anymore. She had to do something. Punch something. Fight something. Storm a castle, defeat an orc lord, take another shot at the red mountain. The things that she used to do that would help her feel less like the stupid, powerless, piece of crap that the rest of the world seemed intent on showing her she was.
But the second she’d log onto The Boiling Isles, or discord, or anything else, the others would know that she was online and they would hound her until she wouldn’t be able to breath. Even if she ignored them, their avatars could track down hers and send messages to her that would be impossible to ignore.
Then she paused. Glancing back toward her door, Luz could barely make out the outline of her backpack in the darkness of her room. She hadn’t touched it since before the dance. After carefully unfolding herself from her chair, she made her way over to it and opened it up. There was little grace to how she grabbed the ratty sketch book from within and she paid no mind to the sticky notes that fluttered as she dropped it onto her desk.
Luz opened her laptop again, momentarily blinking at the sudden brightness before opening up discord and removing Salix, Caesar, and Witchling from her friends list and blocking them. She removed herself from any joint channel that they had, any voice channels, anything that connected her to any of them. Then, when that was done, she logged into The Boiling Isles. Luz ignored the dozens, nearly hundreds, of missed messages from them and removed herself from the party before blocking them there as well.
Finally, she took a deep breath and, surprisingly to her, it wasn’t shaking. She didn’t feel her eyes burning with tears like they had been less than a week ago. Her one eye was still a bit swollen but this had nothing to do with that. Or maybe it had everything to do with everything. Luz didn’t know and at that moment she didn’t care.
She paused, holding her breath for just a moment.
That’s right. She didn’t care.
Luz straightened her back in her chair and opened up the private server she’d had for a while. She used to work on it a lot in the hours between when Salix and Caesar would go to bed and when her mom would get home from work, but since Witchling usually stayed on with her for a while longer, Luz hadn’t had the opportunity to go solo as often as she once did.
Foot bouncing from excess energy, Luz opened up an old file on her server while simultaneously flipping open to a specific page in her notebook. She hadn’t touched the file on her computer since approximately four days before school started back in September, but even after she started sleeping through her first period, that still left quite a few boring classes for her to think through some of the more complicated design and coding elements.
Her eyes glanced over the intricate yet still simple sketch. The glowing red orb that indicated magical uses, the mechanical aspects to make it clear that it had artificer elements, the gold accents over the white base of the shaft and the wing to give it a bit more prestige to its appearance.
Luz’s thumb ran over the letters at the top of the page and the title of ‘The Artificer’s Staff’ seemed to shine in the light from her computer screen like some form of a promise.
She flexed her fingers before placing them over the keys.
Time to get to work.