Of Wings 
and Words

This story was originally written for the NYC Midnight Short Story Contest with a prompt of Fantasy/summer/a litterbug

Partnering up in class as a new student had to be something cooked up by a hell dimension. I stared around the room, scoping out my classmates to see who might be good to partner with for a historical research project. I basically didn't know anybody, and history was not my best subject. I needed someone who knew what they were doing.
     Eventually, my eyes caught on a fairy girl. She was petite, as fairies tend to be, with ombre green hair and bright yellow eyes and something about her pulled at me. Most of the rest of the class was paired up anyway, so I headed toward her.
     She was standing at the back of the classroom, looking at the floor. An elf boy towered over her, with flaming red hair, copper eyes, and freckles. He was pretty to look at, but there was a sneer on his face that I didn't like. None of the usual blank, emotionless face that elves were famous for, not for this boy. I just reached the row of desks behind where they were standing when I heard him.
     "Freaking litterbug," he sighed, "guess we'll have to pair up again."
     The little fairy seemed to shrink in on herself at his words and I felt rage erupt in me.
     "What did you just say to her?" I asked. Well, I might have screeched the words. It's been known to happen on occasion.
     "What?" The boy didn't seem concerned that I just heard him use a nasty slur, he just turned and eyed me like I was the crazy one. "I don't know what you're talking about."
     The rest of the class had gone quiet at my screech and they separated like the Ancient Fae Courts as the teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, headed our way.
     "Is everything okay, Miss Greenleaf, Mr. Ashwood? Miss Summer?"
     "Yeah, I was just about to pair up with Summer again when the new girl started yelling," the elf boy said.
     "Um, no,” I said. "I was coming to ask Summer if she'd like to partner with me--"
     Summer’s head snapped up, disbelief in her eyes.
     Something ugly crossed the elf boy's face.
     "—when I heard Mr. Ashwood here call her, well, I'm not willing to repeat it."
     Summer blushed and the elf boy rolled his eyes.
     "You must have misheard me," he said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Summer is my cousin, I would never say anything like that."
     "I'm confused—" Mrs. Jenkins began.
     "Are you an Eco Fairy, by chance?" I asked Summer.
     She nodded slowly.
     Mrs. Jenkins froze.
     There is no way to tell by looking what a fairy's archetype is, not by color or height or  wing shape. New as I was, I shouldn't have known what kind of fairy Summer was. The safest bet, of course, was to guess Garden Fairy, because they made up the majority of the fairy population, but there were also fairies who connected more with the sea, the forest, the mountains, animals, or even society at large. Eco Fairies were a relatively recent archetype and a largely derided one. Both by climate change deniers who didn't believe we'd overtaxed the planet we lived on with technology and magic and by purists who didn't believe it was a true archetype because of it’s recent genesis. Being an Eco Fairy was a tough gig.
     "Mr. Ashwood, I certainly hope Miss Greenleaf didn't hear what she thought," Mrs. Jenkins voice was growing cooler by the second.
     "No, she must have been mistaken!" the elf boy held up his hands and tried to look innocent.
     I just stared at him. What he'd said was not okay.
     Mrs. Jenkins sighed. "Mr. Ashwood, I'm going to write you a note. I want you to take it directly to the principal's office. Am I understood?"
     "But I didn't even," the elf boy started, but Mrs. Jenkins cut him off, her voice like a whip.
     "Am I understood?"
     "Yes," the elf boy sulked.
     "Good," Mrs. Jenkins' tone left no doubt that the situation was not, in fact, good at all. Then she turned to me and Summer, "Why don't the two you sit down, you can take Mr. Ashwood's desk, Miss Greenleaf, and pick a topic together. In fact, all of you can do that," she turned and spoke to the class at large. "If you have a partner, sit down and pick a topic. Once you have it, come up and let me know what it is." She sounded chipper, but her smile didn't quite reach her eyes and when she turned back to the elf boy, it slid from her face.
     "Follow me," she said and headed towards her desk.
     The elf boy knocked his shoulder against mine as he passed, muttering something under his breath. I didn't quite catch what he said, but it sounded a lot like a human-specific slur I hadn't ever actually heard used outside of historical books. I took a deep breath and moved on.
     "Hi," Summer said quietly as I turned and headed toward the seat next to hers.
     "Hey. I'm Lilac," I introduced myself, even though Mrs. Jenkins had already done it earlier in the week. I hesitated, unsure if I should bring up what just happened.
     "I know," she gave me a small smile. "So, what topic do you want to pick?"
     Apparently not.
     "Have you looked at the list?" I asked her instead. She nodded. "Did any of the topics stand out to you? I don't particularly care, I'm not big on history."
     "No, me neither," she admitted.
     "Hey," I was struck by a thought, "what if we went off the list? Do you think Mrs. Jenkins will mind?"
     She looked unsure for a moment, then shrugged.
     "She's pretty chill. She'll probably let us. We have to tell her our topic today, anyway, so we might as well ask."
     "That's the spirit," I smiled. "So here's what I was thinking..."
 
     "Do you want to come hang out at my place?" I asked Summer as we headed out into the bright afternoon sun once class was over. History was thankfully my last class of the day. I liked the shy fairy and I wanted to get to know her better, but I also had an ulterior motive.
     "Oh. Um. Do you want to work on the project more?" She asked.
     "No," I laughed a little, "I'm just new in town and want to hang out with someone besides my moms for a change."
     "Oh. Well, yeah. Sure." Summer smiled at me, a bit unsure still.
     "Come on, they'll love you," I told her honestly.
     It only took a few minutes to walk to the new house. And I managed to make Summer laugh three whole times on the way. I counted that as a win.
     "Moms, we're home," I called as I opened the door.
     "'We?'" Mama Rose came out of the kitchen a second later drying her hands on a tea towel. "Who's 'we?'"
     "I made a friend!" I bragged, waggling my eyebrows and Mama Rose beamed at me. I stepped aside and gestured at Summer.
     "Mama Rose, this is Summer. Summer this is-"
     "Rose! Of Clan Buckthorn! Oh Mab!" Summer squeaked as she interrupted me. "You're the most famous Eco Fairy in the world!"
     Mama Rose laughed a little at that.
     "Well I don't know about that. I've written a couple books, sure, but..."
     "No, you're amazing. I mean, the books you've written. Climate Change: A Macroscopic History? Where the Eco Fairies Dance? They're amazing!"
     "You said that already," I teased.
     Summer just looked from Mama Rose, to me, then back to her. "She's your mom!" Summer was practically vibrating.
     "That's what the adoption decree says, anyway," I winked at Mama Rose, who flicked her tea towel at me.
     "Well come in," Mama Rose said, heading back toward the kitchen, "I went grocery shopping today so we have actual food. Why don't you girls settle in with a snack?"
     I followed my mom, laughing as Summer practically floated to the kitchen. This had been a good idea.
     After our snack, we retreated to my room, which was basically unpacked if you didn't count three boxes in the corner of the room that I was staunchly ignoring. I wasn't even sure what was in them. Moving over the summer had been hard, especially leaving the coast and heading inland to farming territory, but Mom Celeste was really enjoying her new job. I was determined to make the best of the situation, and part of that was befriending Summer.
     "I have a delicate question," I started out, unsure how she was going to react to my butting into a sensitive situation.
     "It's about Connor, isn't it?" She said, turning away from her perusal of my bookshelves.
     "Connor?"
     "Connor Ashwood. My quote-unquote cousin," she replied, making the little finger gestures in the air.
     "Yes. I just...if you don't want to talk about it, that's fine. But does he usually...?"
     "Call me awful names? Yeah. His whole family is like that. My mom is an elf," she explained, "and after my dad, who was a Sea Fairy, died she moved us here from the capital. Then she met and married my stepdad, who's Connor's mom's brother. So technically we're step-cousins."
     "How old were you?" I asked. How long had she had to deal with this kind of bigotry?
     "I was six when my dad died and we moved. She met Stephan two years later. He's actually not a bad guy, but his sister married into a very purist-leaning family and she kind of adopted their ideals. We rarely see them, but of course I go to school with Connor so he's harder to avoid." She shrugged, as if being called derisive names all the time was no big deal.
     "Why haven't you told anyone?" I asked as gently as I could. I didn't want her to feel like I was attacking. I was genuinely curious.
     "He's just always been like that." She shrugged again. "He's careful not to do it where anyone can hear, today notwithstanding, and... I don't know, it just never occurred to me to mention it to anyone until we were older and by then it seemed like it would be too late to say anything. No one would believe me."
     "I'm sure your mom would have believed you," I said, hoping it was true.
     "She might have. But they're nicer to her, the whole family is, than they are to me. I'm the only one who's not an elf. And then being an Eco Fairy, and not a proper fairy?" Summer was practically wilting as she spoke.
     "Maybe I should have kicked Connor in the balls," I muttered the inside thought out loud. Summer smiled, but I noticed tears in her eyes. Time to change the subject.
     "So Mom Celeste will be home soon and Mama Rose is probably working on dinner," I said. "Do you want to stay and join us?"
     "I should probably head home. I mirrored my mom where I was, but she gets worried if I'm not home by dinner," she stood and stretched, her wings fluttering.
     "Okay," I told. "Speaking of which, let's make sure we get each other's mirror details before you leave."
 
     I didn't curse Connor. I considered it, I envisioned it, I may have even muttered a prayer into the universe, but I did not cast any curses. The fact that I was a cantrip queen, capable of casting only the most basic of spells, was not a factor. If I'd wanted to, I would have figured out how to curse the elf boy. Instead, I decided to wait.
     He did get in trouble for using the slur he used, but not nearly enough in my opinion. He got detention for three days. With how awful he was to Summer, he should have been removed from any of their shared classes and had a spell cast on him so that he literally could never speak to her again, but nobody asked me.
Summer spent more and more time at my house as the semester progressed. We hung out as friends and as classmates, working on our history research project. I'd never been so fired up about history and Mama Rose was delighted at my new interest. It was definitely useful to have a historian in the house. Mom Celeste was a lawyer and even that turned out to be helpful for our project. By the time the end of the semester rolled around, we were as prepared as we could be to blow everyone away.
     The day had come for our presentation and Summer had a touch of stage fright, if her shivering wings were anything to go by.
     It was Friday, and we'd been sitting through our classmates' presentations all week. We'd learned about everything from Fairy-Elven Integration in the late 16th century to Ancient Fae Civilizations like the Seelie Empire, Ancient Atlantis, and Yggdrasil and the Nine Kingdoms to the Orc Rights Movement of 1939.
     "Okay," Summer took a deep breath and spoke to herself quietly, "it's going to be okay. You're not going to make a fool of yourself."
     "Hey, we're more than prepared for this," I tried to calm her. "Besides, nothing could be worse than Derek and Amalia's presentation, right?"
     As I hoped, that got a laugh out of her.
    Derek and Amalia had presented about the fall of an Unseelie Emperor who had ruled Drakken in, like, 500 BCE and they had bombed hard. Amalia had been inaudible, she was so nervous, and the sources they used for their presentation were suspect at best. Even Mrs. Jenkins hadn't been able to keep up the elven blank face, she'd been so horrified.
     Summer and I were going to do so much better. Not only had all of our sources been vetted by Mama Rose, we were using mixed media for our presentation. The original assignment Mrs. Jenkins had given us had specified that we could present however we wanted, creating a diorama or a PowerPoint or a spell. We'd combined two of the three options and I was pretty sure we were going to rock it.
     Mrs. Jenkins nodded at us and we stood up and headed for the front of the room. Connor, on the other side of the room, rolled his eyes and I muttered the incantation to connect the class mirror to my smaller one, which had the presentation saved on it. It took a second, but finally the first slide of our PowerPoint shimmered onto the mirror and I turned and made direct eye contact with Connor. The title of our presentation was simple and direct and I saw it hit Connor like a psychic blast.
     "The Emergence and History of the Eco Fairy Archetype," I said firmly, still staring him in the eye.

Needless to say, we got an A.