1.12 Mina de Malfois and the Reality Check (part two)
[The author wishes to thank all those of you who've stuck with her (and with Mina) this far, especially those who've commented, emailed, linked other people here or created Minaverse things. Thank you all very much.
Oh, and the footnotes for Reality Check will be up next week.]

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. No resemblance is intended to any person or persons living, dead, or online. No BNFs were harmed in the making of this fic.

Permissions: All rights reserved. All other reproduction, transmission, or storage, in any format, is prohibited unless the author is contacted beforehand and grants specific written permission. The author may be contacted at mina_de_malfois@yahoo.com.



‘And you mean nothing’s burnt down yet?’ Ciyerra messaged.

‘Not a thing,’ I confessed, hating to disappoint her.

‘Never mind, dear,’ she typed, as though she thought I might be disappointed. ‘A group of girls are planning a sea voyage to the Patricic Rim for some time in September. I’ll put in a word for you and see that you’re invited along.’

It was the last week at camp, and reality continued to be less well-plotted than the Girls’ Dormitory set had hoped, although some of my campers had formed friendships and played smallish pranks, so there was that to report on. The daily routine of camp was as reassuringly timeless as any Hockeystickser could have hoped, but the casual motley of the ‘uniforms’ had been a sad disappointment on the one occasion I’d managed to upload pictures, and without a single fire or life-threatening drowning to report I sensed I was letting the side down.

They, on the other hand, had behaved marvellously, sending me a Girls’ Dormitory Care Package complete with cookies and a bound copy of this year’s Virtual Girls Annual. It was particularly touching when you remembered that I’d never posted at their corner of Penn’d Passion. I suppose they viewed me as part of their wider circle of acquaintance, or maybe my hosting Ciyerra’s spirit-raising had won them over. It was sweet of them, and I was a little bit homesick for the web, and therefore inclined to get teary-eyed over kind gestures; I’d sniffled over that Annual more than one likes to admit.

My reduced net access had made it even more difficult to open the envelope from St. Scholastica’s than would otherwise have been the case. Say what you will about the limitations of online friendships--such as how one never really knows who’s at the other end of those electrons--the fact remains that they’re a source of moral support. It’s easier to face real life disappointments if you know the squees of happy fanfic readers await you. It kind of takes the edge off rejection.

I’m sure I’d have eventually worked up the nerve to open the dratted thing, but as it happened Jen sprang unexpectedly into our bedroom and caught me gazing at the still-sealed envelope. I’d been counting on privacy for the nightly ritual of not reading my mail--she usually disappeared after we’d got the girls settled and the lights out, and returned after I was asleep. But, as I said, on this night she caught me suspended inertly between hope and despair. She plucked the envelope out of my fingers, glanced at the return address, and said easily, ‘College admission jitters? Want me to open it for you?’ She hit just the right note of callous compassion, and I nodded.

‘Well done Mina,’ she went on, once she’d glanced at the contents. She handed over my acceptance letter, laid the rest of the contents on the bed beside me, and ruffled my hair with a casual intimacy that in other circs would have irritated me enormously. ‘St. Schol’s have let you in. Very elite school, that: they don’t take just anybody.’

I almost couldn’t believe it. Of course it seems silly now to think they could ever have turned me down, but the truth was, I’d been worried. I know it’s difficult to believe, but I’d had a crisis of faith once I’d sent off the forms committing me, should they accept me, to my place at St. Scholastica’s and my half of a dorm room. I’d been out of uni for a while now, and not exactly improving my mind via my career, either. St. Scholastica’s looked poshly austere and serious. What if I just wasn’t good enough?

The relief was so enormous I was trembling. Jen noticed, and though she quite decently looked quickly away and pretended not to have seen, she did say, ‘You shouldn’t care so much about other people’s opinions.’

Bloody cheek! It’s not as if she knew me well enough to make that sort of enormous judgement--and anyway, who was she to talk? It was probably easy for her to shrug off things like university acceptance, but I had a reputation to keep up. I’d have felt awful if I’d had to admit to Arc that I’d been turned down, after she’d got me this job. And since the camp had put me up for the scholarship, if I’d been rejected by St. Scholastica’s I bet they’d have told Ms. Hamill. I’d have had to worry that she might accidentally have told PrinceC, in which case I’d have literally died of embarrassment, or that she’d discuss it with Arc, which would have been too utterly awful for words. I glared at the back of Jen’s head. She’d probably never had to keep a secret or worry about her reputation in her life. She couldn’t begin to understand the sort of strain I’d been under.

Still. She had opened the envelope. I relented, though she’d been irritatingly oblivious of both the glare and the relenting. ‘I really wanted to get in,’ I said, as calmly as I could manage.

‘To an all-girls university?’ she asked mockingly. ‘Where, no matter how stellar the education you’ll be getting, you’ll be surrounded day and night by a pack of women? Hard to tell if it’s worth it.’ I hadn’t really asked for her input, so it took a rather major effort not to snap at her. It never so much as crossed my mind that she mightn’t be addressing me at all. I knew very little about my co-counsellor, really, other than that the campers senselessly adored her.

We endured one afternoon when we couldn’t get the girls settled down at all. They didn’t want to do anything online, not even browse teen wizard porn; they just wanted to surround us at the front of the room and gossip about the mysterious stranger who’d arrived by landing a seaplane on the lake, and who was now shut up in Ms. Hamill’s cabin. Jen and I had missed all this excitement.

As soon as we had a free period Jen grabbed me by the hand. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We have to go ask Ms. Hamill when we can expect our pay stubs to be mailed out.’ It was as good an excuse as any. I followed her.

We’d no sooner stepped onto her porch than Ms. Hamill’s door swung open. ‘But how did you guess?’ she was saying, and then fell abruptly silent when she saw the two of us. She eyed Jen curiously, almost as if she didn’t recognise her. ‘Did you want something, girls?’ she asked, still with that strange expression on her face.

‘No, Ms. Hamill,’ Jen said meekly, abandoning our alibi without warning. I couldn’t have spoken, myself. I was rendered temporarily speechless by the sight of the person who’d followed Eva Hamill through the door.

The stranger was tall, broad shouldered, and dressed in a black tuxedo and a ruffled white shirt. It took me a confused couple of moments to realize she was female. Her hair was mostly reddish-blonde, but there were locks and strands of every shade of gold and silver and copper.

‘It’s nice to see you,’ she said, sounding amused. She seemed to speak to Jen, but then she grinned at me. My knees wobbled, and I had a moment of not knowing where to put my hands, and feeling that my feet had grown to gigantic, unmanageable proportions. ‘Perhaps you two could row me out to the Otter?’

‘I’ll row you out to the Otter,’ Ms. Hamill said firmly before we had a chance to agree, and the stranger’s grin deepened. She made a very neat, formal bow to our chief of staff, sort of both courtly and mocking, and the two of them left. We watched them closely all the way down the trail, but they walked without speaking, at least until they were out of view.

‘Well,’ said Jen, sounding awed. I didn’t answer, but I knew exactly what she meant.

On the last evening at camp the computer lab was almost deserted--I guess the campers preferred to spend their last bit of time with each other rather than emailing people they’d see tomorrow anyway. I slipped into a seat and messaged Arc.

‘I’m having a bout of nerves,’ I confessed, my fingers trembling on the keyboard.

‘Don’t,’ she advised, calmly and impossibly. ‘Don’t even think about it. Just get back to your apartment and concentrate on all the things you need to do--terminate your lease and pack up your things and sell the things you can’t pack--and before you know it you’ll be there.’

‘But what if I’m not good enough?’ I typed. ‘I mean, who am I, really?’ Then I looked in horror at what I’d written and logged off, even reaching out one ice-cold hand to shut down my computer, making absolutely certain I wouldn’t see her answer. What had I done? Why had I written that?

Jen stood up from her own computer near the door, looking distracted. ‘Turn out the lights before you leave, will you, Mina?’ she asked, hurrying out before I even answered. She must have been having as bad an image-management night as I was; she’d forgotten to shut off her computer. I leaned over to flick it off on my way out, and inadvertently read the screen. ‘Please click to complete Sanguinity Online logout, Josh Amos,’ it said. I nearly shrieked out loud from sheer shock.

I was, as you can imagine, entirely distracted from my own problems for at least fifteen minutes. It wasn’t until I was getting ready for bed, against a backdrop of overexcited chatter from the tightly-wound overly-energetic denizens of Cabin 13, that it hit me. ‘Just get back to your apartment,’ Arc had written.

But that meant--that meant--Arc knew I really lived there. She knew I’d been lying all along. Why was she even friends with me, then? How could she even stand me?

My heart felt like lead.

I crawled into bed hoping to die in my sleep, and eventually fell into troubled dreams, and woke at some ghastly hour of the morning. I couldn’t re-achieve drowsiness, so I gave up on it and got up, dressing quietly so as not to wake ‘Josh’ or the campers, and went for a walk along the lake.

Now that I was awake and, if not bright-eyed, at least clear-headed, I thought I understood. She’d alluded before to her expectations that someday I’d move on to creating original fiction. Perhaps Archivist12 had got in on the ground floor, so to speak, by friending a future Real Live Novelist. That, I thought, had to be the answer.

I went on thinking that I’d figured it out all through helping the campers with last minute packing, and hugging them goodbye as their parents drove up, and gathering my own things together. I was waiting for the bus when Jen caught up to me. I’d been carefully avoiding her all day, out of the sheer awkwardness induced by knowing the truth about her screen name, but she just thrust something at me. ‘This arrived for you at the main office,’ she gasped, and dashed off to the carful of friends that had come to pick her up.

I turned it over in my hands, curiously. It was a telegram. I’d never had a telegram before. I hadn’t been sure they still existed, even, outside of books. I waited until I was sitting on the bus to open it. If it was something bad I wanted to be sitting down.

‘Who are you, really?’ it read. ‘You’re Mina, of course: the girl who can sit all alone in a grotty little apartment and still summon up the will to build Manors in the clouds, and then fill them with friends. Of course you’re good enough. Much love, Arc.’