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masters.
    My stomach twisted, and I pushed away the plate I hadn’t touched. “Yeah, that reminds me—I should … uh, do my summer reading.” Great Goddess, that was a lame lie, especially since I’d finished it ages ago. Still, I knew Mom would never protest the idea of my doing schoolwork. I got up from the table and headed to my room before Mom could ask anything that might blow my cover, as it were.

     
    My roomwas one of three upstairs bedrooms. It was one of the smaller ones, but I liked it because it had a dormer, a cubbyhole-like section with a low, slanted triangular ceiling that followed where a window jutted out. It was big enough that I wedged a desk in there against one wall, and a makeshift bookcase against the other. Manga, graphic novels, and books of all sorts were piled everywhere. The rest of the room was occupied by my bed and more overflowing bookshelves.
    I’d left the top of one case bare. It was the only section of the room not smothered in reading material. It was my altar. I hadn’t changed it since the dark moon meditation I’d done a couple of weeks ago. It was still covered in a simple square of black cloth. Two silver candleholders held one black and one white candle. A round mirror from one of my compacts lay faceup between them. I’d forgotten to put away my athame, a black-handled ritual dagger, and it sat next to the mirror. There used to be a snake-headed Nile goddess figurine in a place of honor on the altar, until I discovered, last year, that the talisman was in the same shape. Now it was stored in the bottom of my desk drawer, collecting dust.
    After I closed the door, I grabbed my cell phone from where it was charging on my desk. I intended to distract myself by checking in with my sometimes BFF, Bea, but discovered a dozen or so texts waiting. Lying down on the bed, I scrolled through them.
    Thompson wanted to know if we were going to try out for Renaissance Festival together tomorrow. I sent him a quick reply that he could pick me up after driver’s ed. I also warned him that from what I’d heard from Lane, one of our other theater friends, the whole audition was improvisation—not something either Thompson or I was any good at. One of the reasons I loved theater so much was that it came with a script—something I found lacking in real life. Improv was all about making stuff up on the fly. As weird as it might sound from a longtime theater geek like me, I really didn’t like all the pressure of people staring at me while I tried to be clever.
    Beahad left a couple of messages about this big midsummer picnic that was supposed to go down this weekend. Our coven—actually, since I failed Initiation, it was really more
Bea’s
coven—had this “open house” every summer where the Inner and Outer Circle were invited to a potluck at Como Park. You could even bring mundanes, non–True Magic people, and Bea wanted to know if I was bringing Thompson as a date.
    “Ha-ha,” I texted back. None of my friends could deal with the fact that he and I were just theater buddies. Heck, I still thought of him as Thompson, despite his constant insistence that I call him Matt.
    Plus, I think everyone, “Matt” included, really liked the idea of the star-crossed lovers: the jock and the class weirdo. I wasn’t completely opposed to the idea—Thompson had that he-man appeal of the high school hockey star—but, it didn’t seem right that I couldn’t talk to him about the most important stuff in my life. What kind of relationship could we really have? It was not as if I could tell him about my dad being a vampire or that my mom was the Queen of Witches.
    Bea wroteback. “Come on. It would be fun. T. would totally freak.”
    Even though no one ever used Real Magic or brought along their vampire butler, the potluck did bring out some of our stranger members. There were all sorts of people in the Outer Circle, for instance, that Thompson would consider “woo-woo.” Even Nikolai’s