where no cars go [OPEN]

[layla aubrey jameson ,]

“Evanesco!”

The incantation came out as a hiss, barely pushing through the gritted teeth of the fifth year brunette. The snail on the table before her trembled slightly in its shell, but remained wholly positioned on the table. Completely visible.

“Dammit!”

Huffing, Layla felt as though her skull was about to explode. Clenching her jaw in frustration was causing a rather painful headache and she wasn’t sure how much longer she had left before she induced an aneurysm or some equally traumatic brain incident. She had been at this spell for hours now, practicing and practicing and to no avail. She admittedly started with something a bit more complicated: one of the school owls. She had stupefied the poor thing, feeling very badly about it but everyone else in her class was using owls or cats or other pet mammals so she had to. She snuck up to the owlery earlier in the day, about mid-morning, and waited until it was empty. After ensuring she had a minute or so to sneak in and do it unseen, she crept towards one of the school owls that was half dozing in its little cubby hole and hit it with the gentlest stunning spell she could muster. That wasn’t very hard since apparently she was totally rubbish at this whole being a witch thing. After successfully sneaking the stupefied animal out of the owlery, she found another equally abandoned tower and set herself up in a small room on the east side of the castle, facing the lake. Layla was relatively sure she wasn’t going to be bothered up here. It was Saturday and most of the school had utilized the beautiful weather as a ticket to Detaillant. Layla happened to have a transfiguration exam coming up, as well as the damn career counseling appointment in about two weeks, and she was at a total loss for both. She wasn’t sure how she had let herself get so behind but she was looking like she might actually have to repeat her fifth year! Her father was going to kill her when he got word of all of this.

After practicing for a little while on the owl and noticing that absolutely nothing was happening except she was just speeding along the waking up process, Layla gave up on the owl. She sat with her head propped up on the palm of her hair, staring gloomily at the creature until it awoke in a terror. Almost immediately upon regaining consciousness it took to the air and started screeching trying to find a way out. Naturally, Layla also flew into her own sort of panic and started trying to shoo it towards the window. If anything, she just wanted the god awful screeching to stop. After what felt like hours but was only probably a minute or so, the bird found its way out the window and took off in the exact opposite direction of the owlery. Feeling rather guilty, Layla highly considered just going to see her professor and explaining that it was okay she was just going to be a fifth year forever and never graduate. She wasn’t aging, so it wasn’t like that situation could get weird at any time. She wasn’t going to be some creepy 40 year old woman in with a bunch of 16 year olds. Well, not aesthetically at least. However, she wasn’t so naïve as to think that she was going to be able to succeed on the larger animal. The class had begun by practicing on snails and Layla had… well, she hadn’t succeeded there either but she did happen to lighten the shell a little bit once. That was better than nothing, right?

Wrong. She was screwed.

After literally hours of practicing, getting frustrated and stopping, stomping around the room, talking to herself in erratic tones, and calming down enough to practice again, Layla found herself making absolutely no progress. Here she still sat and there the snail still sat and much to her disdain neither was able to vanish. With O.W.L.s coming up soon she was genuinely starting to panic. Years one through four had gone rather smoothly for her, academically. And that included her being turned into an entirely different species, almost getting murdered in her “sleep” by her grandmother, having a yearlong fall out with her father, and other family and friend issues. She had gone through all sorts of things and her fifth year was actually her most relaxed and least dramatic year yet and here she was unable to succeed in her most basic classes. She like transfiguration and she found it interesting. She liked Defense Against the Dark Arts and Potions and Divination and definitely not Ancient Runes because lets be honest that class is useless but Charms and Care of Magical Creatures and everything else were alright in her book. Now she was finding it hard to get her essays completed and master the wand work behind rather easy spells. It was so incredibly frustrating.

Layla glared at the snail in front of her, eyes narrowed. She took a few deep breaths and tried to calm the angry shakes that were rolling down her back in tides. Her frustration levels were at an all-time high and she felt like picking up the snail and just dropping it out the open window. That would make it vanish alright. Wow, the girl was really going all out with the animal cruelty today wasn’t she? She isn’t usually like this.

“One more time,” she murmured to herself. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath in through her nose and exhaled through her mouth. Slowly opening her bright blue eyes, she let them rest gently on the outer shell of the snail on the table a few feet in front of her. She relaxed her wrist, her wand feeling like a natural extension of her arm. Her fingers twitched as she began to move the wand in its necessary motion so she froze, took another breath, and tried again. Making a gentle path through the air, Layla spoke the incantation with as much strength as she could muster without putting too much force behind it.

“Evanesco.”

…

Nothing.

Layla slumped to the ground, her wand dropping from her hand. Her butt hit the dusty concrete floor with a painful thud but she couldn’t even be bothered with it. She felt a rush of, not exactly heat since she couldn’t really feel that in these vampiric cheeks of hers, but something similar spread across her face. Her body felt so full of fatigue and she suddenly felt more exhausted than she had felt in years. She was so mentally, physically, and emotionally anguished from all this failure crammed into such a small time frame. She just couldn’t handle it anymore. She pressed the tips of her fingers into her forehead, drawing her knees up in front of her and leaning her chin against her kneecaps.

“I’m so gonna fail my O.W.L.s,” she whimpered.