Accio Arboreali

Dani marched into her apartment with an air of satisfaction. She had a large tome tucked in her arms—it was really only the size of a cookbook, but it seemed much grander in comparison to her small frame— that she presented to her roommate triumphantly. This, of course, meant shoving it directly between Grace’s focused squint and the sketch she was working on.

Grace startled backward, then sighed and looked up at Dani. “What is it this time?”

“Oh, this?” Dani said, “Just your average magic tome, no biggie.”

“Magic?” Grace repeated. “You don’t seriously want to try that sort of thing, do you?”

“Of course I do! It’s not just for crazy people anymore, y’know. It’s trendy! Everyone wants to learn some dark arts nowadays. It’ll look super cool, even if the spell doesn’t work. Plus, I got this for, like, five bucks at Goodwill. What’s the harm in trying, right?”

Grace shook her head. “I guess I can’t stop you, but I can’t say I like it, either. It’s not worth it to mess around with stuff like that.” She paused, noticing the guilty look on her friend’s face. “Whatever you’re about to ask, the answer is no.”

“Actually,” Dani said, dragging out the last syllable and trying out her best puppy-dog eyes, “I kind-of super need your help to draw just a few of these sigils.”

Grace gave her a flat look. “What did I just say.” It wasn’t a question.

“Please?”

“No. And that’s final.”

“Pretty please with whipped cream and a cherry on top? And I’ll do your chores for a week?”

“... Two weeks.”

“Done!”

“Ugh, fine.” Grace groaned. “Show me the book.”

An hour later, Grace cracked her neck as she stood up from her work. Dani was hovering by her side, filling her phone’s camera roll with photos of the intricate chalk symbols. She claimed they were “for posterity,” but Grace knew she would scroll past them on Twitter later. The furniture in their apartment’s minuscule living room had been shoved against the walls, giving Grace plenty of space to cover the hardwood floors in lines, circles, and sigils that mimicked those in the book.

“So that's it?” Dani prompted.

“Yeah, I think so,” Grace replied. She absentmindedly rubbed chalk dust onto her jeans. “What are you supposed to do now, exactly?”

“Uh.” Dani flipped a few pages ahead in the book. “I'm just supposed to read this incantation, and then whatever is supposed to happen will happen.”

“Wait.” Grace whipped around to face her roommate. “You're telling me that you don't know what this is even supposed to do? What kind of idiot dabbles in magic without even knowing what it’s supposed to do?!”

“Oof, you wound me! It's fine, though. It's a book about trees, it’s not like it’s going to hurt anyone.”

Before Grace could try to dissuade her, Dani started reading out the passage in her best dramatic theater voice. Grace clamped her mouth shut and waited for the speech to end; it didn’t matter what the spell might do, everyone knew that magic always turned out worse when it was interrupted. Dani finally reached the end of the chant and commanded, “Accio arboreali!”

They stared at the sigils expectantly. Nothing happened.

Grace slumped. “Guess it really was just a fake. I shouldn't have been worried about something so—”

And with that, a small plant sprouted in the middle of the largest sigil, quickly expanding into a sapling, then a small tree, growing bigger and bigger until its branches touched the ceiling, then even further than that. Grace gaped up at the new hole in their ceiling as the tree sped ever upward, crashing through the next few floors up in the blink of an eye. Distantly, she heard someone scream.

“Holy crap,” Dani breathed. A grin slowly overtook the shock on her face. “My followers are going to love this.”

Originally submitted to the University of Chicago on January 1, 2020 as part of my college application.