Sibling time “Wing-whaty-what-what-now?” Seth asked shaking his head at Ellie. She giggled.
“Wingardiam Leviosa,” she enunciated carefully, swishing a stick. Ellie had written long and careful letters back home, describing everything for her family, but she knew Seth was much more of a do-er than a reader, and she wanted the magical world to be real and alive to him as much as their parents – maybe even more so, seeing as he’d be coming to school with her next year. And so, when they had been on a nature walk the previous day, Ellie had made a list for Seth of all kinds of ‘magical’ things he could collect. Most of them had been ‘potions supplies’ but the absolute most important – the one that had had him scrabbling around retrieving and discarding sticks faster than a Labrador puppy – had been the hunt for a wand. Ellie had picked up a suitable spare too, seeing as she couldn’t use her real one at home, and they were now up in her bedroom ‘practising spells.’
“I am never going to remember words like that,” Seth groaned.
“Sure you are. You got the first part down already. And then it’s… it’s like ‘guardian’ only with an ‘m’ and ‘levitate’ only a little bit different. Imagine your guardian angel hovering over you.”
“Wing-guardian-hover-something?” Seth tried, still without much conviction. “Words don’t just stick in my brain like they do in yours,” he reminded her. And the idea that you could just take a huge word like ‘guardian’ and chop a letter off and work out what it would sound like if you stuck another one in its place – his brain could not hold all that at once, nor do the mental gymnastics required. “Mom told you they put me on the wait list for dyslexia testing, right?” he added. “I’m gonna be bottom set for everything if magic school needs long words to get anything done!” he sighed.
“No you won’t,” Ellie assured him. “First of all, it’s not like that. There aren’t sets – I told you, we have these big classes with multiple grades in. And I’ll be around to help you. And potions and Care of Magical Creatures don’t need many words at all.” Okay, you needed to read the potions ingredients and instructions accurately, and she had left out Herbology because there were a lot of difficult plant names, but for the most part, magic school was far more hands on and practical than anything else she’d experienced before, and that was going to suit Seth so much because he was just that kind of learner. “And if you need extra help, you just go see Professor Skies. She’s really nice.”
“Okay,” Seth accepted hesitantly. He was still somewhat worried that he wouldn’t manage very well, but that was how he already felt about school here, so what was the difference? Sure, that world had long words, but there were lots of long words in regular school too. Like that thing that plants did. And you had to have spelling tests about exceptions to rules, as if the words that followed the rules weren’t already enough to get your head around. Ellie hadn’t said anything about spelling tests at Sonora. He wasn’t sure if that was because it was a magic school or a high school – he wasn’t sure if regular high schoolers had to do them. But any world without them was a good one. Plus it had an animal petting class, and his big sister, and a support teacher if he got stuck. “One more time? And then we can go see if mom found another broom and you can teach me more Quidditch!” Learning about sport had been top of his priority list, but mom vacuumed way more than she swept and the little brush that came with the dustpan wasn’t going to cut it. So, she was currently rummaging through the shed looking for substitutes. Ellie had assured her that anything on a stick would do, and suspected they’d get to ‘play Quidditch’ on some kind of combination of a garden rake and the bathroom mop.
“Wingardium Leviosa!” Ellie repeated slowly. “Let’s do it bit by bit,” she added, holding up hands so they could make it a clapping rhyme. Seth hesitated, because clapping rhymes were sort of girly, but it was just them, and he did find rhythms and songs helped him remember. “Wing. Wing gar. Wing gar di. Wing gar di um,” Ellie recited, adding another clap or hand slap for each syllable, until Seth was happily chanting the word along with her. “See!” she crowed triumphantly. “You got it! And it took like… thirty seconds! Now make something fly,” she directed.
Seth pointed his stick at the matchbox cars he’d brought into Ellie’s room, calling out the word confidently. Ellie obediently lifted each one, making it ‘fly’ across the room towards him. “Next year’s gonna be so much fun,” she grinned.