Charmed

Look, no one ever promised me that my charm would be cool, or galaxy-changing, or anything. I wasn’t expecting levitation. I’m not that naive. But the day you find out is supposed to be kind of a big deal. It’s supposed to mean something to someone; your parents, at least. It’s the closest we come to a sacrament in Ichabat City. I think the Ingrates knew I’d be disappointed, and that’s why they scheduled the big reveal for the final of the four charmed days. Better to let a kid hang on to their dreams til the bitter end.

I don’t think the first Ingrates accounted for population growth when they planned the whole charm thing. Four days is not nearly enough time for every member of an entire class in Ichabat City to get through the whole ritual without a fair bit of hustle and some cut corners. That, and it turns out there just aren’t that many special skills and hidden talents and uncanny turns of luck to go around. If everyone is meant to have a charm that’s unique — and that part of the original intent seems pretty inflexible, or we’d have found a way around it by now — then you’re looking at increasingly niche abilities for us youngins.

The first one in my class to have their charmed moment was a squat little terror named Aniiket. There were 38 others scheduled for moments that day, so the event itself was fairly short. A voice over the wall speaker interrupted the morning sit to tell Aniiket to report to the back field. Aniiket vanished for a maximum of four and a half minutes, and reappeared with a snide grin. Talking isn’t exactly allowed during the sit, so we had to wait til first break for the details. Aniiket spun a long tale about an incantation and a gong and crying kin and the apparition of an Ingrate hovering above the field to sanctify the moment, and it all sounded very impressive ’til later we realized one crucial element was missing: the charm itself. A quick glance at the register made it clear why. Aniiket’s charm was Never get caught in a tornado.

“That’s one of the oldest charms there is,” Aniiket blustered when cornered the next day, tugging on a shirtsleeve and looking shiftily down the hall. “Long illustrious line of powerful people had that charm. I’m not ashamed.” Still, when pressed, Aniiket admitted, “I’d probably better learn to code, or pilot ‘ships, or something.”

I told my kin the whole story at last break, and they laughed. “Nothing like your charmed moment to make you realize the importance of school,” said Auntie Roota. She’s one to talk, though. Her charm is redacted in the register, and it got her a job at the central routing office that she can’t ever talk about.

Not every charmed moment was a letdown, of course. Quite a few elder kin died in the last season from a virulent strain of pox, so the list of available unique charms had a few scorchers on it: always have exact change, the right train is always waiting at the platform, water boils on command, drink as much as you want and never get drunk, and—in a particularly rare turn of events—one of the original 6 charms, perfect pitch (throw something and it always goes exactly where you want it to).

As you’ve probably gathered, I didn’t end up with any of those. (Good thing, too- I’ve never been what you’d call athletic, and I’ve heard alarming rumors about what happens if a person and their charm end up a bad match. Messy business all around.)

Anyway, I’ll skip past the outcome for all the other 150 members of my class and zoom right ahead to me. I was on my way to the library after second break on the last of the four days when my anxious stupor was punctured by the sound of my name coming from the wall speaker: “Chadera, report to the parking lot.” I imagine my classmates stared- it’s not exactly a common meeting spot for your charmed moment- but I can’t say I noticed. I was too busy running down the hall to meet my destiny.

School is sometimes a maze and sometimes one long hall (depends who else is walking beside you), but for once, the building permitted me a straight line to the doors. With my uniform streaming behind me, I must have looked like a ball of fire hurtling outside, a blur of reds and blues and panic. And then I stopped. In my hurry, I’d forgotten a small, crucial detail: I’d never properly been to the parking lot.

It’s not that cars don’t exist, or anything. And the Typa Institute is in the middle of a desert, but it’s not a residential school, so a commute in from Ichabat proper is definitely a requirement for the few hundred of us in attendance on any given day. It’s just…there are better ways. Lots of them. So many that I’m not certain I can remember the last time I encountered a car, let alone a place with dedicated real estate to house one. I knew abstractly that the campus map featured some small area labeled ‘car lot’, and a vague sense of its direction, but which direction to turn to get there was a bit less clear.

Fortunately, Auntie Roota was waiting on the path at the bottom of the stairs. “I’m here to escort you to your charmed moment,” she said brightly, grabbing my hand and tugging. “I’m afraid we’re on a bit of a schedule, dear, so you’ll have to hurry. Still 24 more kids to get through this cycle, and only ’til the end of the day to do it.”

The school is an imposing, squatty dome in the middle of effectively nowhere. It’s the same pink-grey as the ashy soil in this barren pocket of the empty ring around Ichabat, and even though it’s the only structure in sight, it blends right into the gentle lumps of the surrounding environs. Seven years as a student, and I still couldn’t tell you exactly what shape the thing is. The gardeners for the school have managed to cultivate some scrubby bushes and oversized succulents despite the blistering heat — no doubt thanks to one of the seemingly endless charms in the Green Thumb group — and we charted a winding path through the brush.

“Listen, there’s something you should know,” said Auntie Roota, suddenly dropping into the lowest register her tinny squeak could manage as she began the words of the ritual. “There used to be magic here, and then some assholes took it away.” Never mind that I could already recite this whole bit by heart: part of the ritual is the saying, and the hearing, and the knowing. “Apparently a world with magic usually ends pretty badly. But this land has an irrepressible spark, so they had to fill the void with something else, lest things start to break up from the impossibility of the situation.”

We rounded a corner, and there it was: a gleaming, pristine little plot, gravel shimmering slightly beneath the afternoon glare. It was, unsurprisingly, free of vehicles.

“That’s where we got charms — and this is where you get yours.” I turned abruptly to look at Auntie Roota. Normally the incantation ends rather differently. She raised an eyebrow and smiled, gesturing towards the center of the parking lot. I tiptoed forward, looking around, but it was only the two of us.

“Sorry, kid. You don’t get an apparition if you’ve got an Ingrate in the family. You get to hear the bad news in the flesh, from the flesh.”

Look, I’m not proud of this part, but it bears mentioning. I was so shaken by her casual mention of Ingrates in the family that I missed it the first time she told me my charm, and had to make her repeat it.

“Chadera, so the Ingrates gifted to our kin, and so I gift to you: you will always be able to find a parking spot.”

I didn’t really know what to say. Probably something like: “Okay, then.”

And then I went back to class, and did my best to forget charms had ever been forced on my world in the first place.