Three years, four months, and seventeen days. That was how long Chelsea had left to live, at least according to her calculations, which were seldom wrong at least as far as basic arithmetic went. She updated the whiteboard mounted on her wall before sighing and rolling out of bed, taking her blankets with her. Across the room, Layla glanced over to where her roommate was laying in a ball on the floor.

"Chel, you got somewhere to be?" she asked, setting her book to the side. Chelsea glanced at the wall behind her and noted that the other girl's whiteboard had already been updated. Down a number from yesterday, it now read "3 years, 2 months, 28 days".

"Probably, I assume they haven't given up on this farce yet."

"What, college? Stop being such a baby and go to class," Layla told her, sitting up and sliding out of her bed to prod Chelsea.

Chelsea rolled her eyes, but sat up and began unwinding herself from her sheets. "You know what I mean."

"I know that the real reason you're avoiding class is your last term grade, not some grand message about ending the deadline."

"I could have a grand message, you don't know that I don't!" Chelsea retorted as she threw her blankets back onto her bed. "And you need to stop calling it that. It's morbid."

Layla laughed. "I love you, but you're not exactly from the Alley."

"I take that as a compliment. From what I hear the kids from the Alley are genuinely insane," Chelsea said. She pulled on a pair of jeans and an old t-shirt.

"Wait, you actually believe in them? I knew you were a conspiracy theorist, but isn't that taking it a bit far?"

"Screw you, Layla. You're the one that says the moon landing was a hoax."

Layla gasped. "I did not! I said that it wasn't us, not that it didn't happen."

Chelsea laughed. "Right, of course. 'Neil Armstrong was magick and that ship wouldn't have gone three feet off the ground without him.'"

"I've shown you the videos—"

"And while watching men in their pajamas try to convince me that history is a lie, that was way before anyone knew about the magick, and I'm pretty sure NASA would have noticed that something was up," Chelsea told her, shushing her friend when she tried to butt in again. "You can tell me all about how the Roanoke Colonies were actually magick too, but later."

"That's actually a good idea. I mean, no one knows why—"

"Layla. Hush. Bye."

"But—"

"Bye," Chelsea interrupted, waving behind her as she slipped out of the room, backpack in tow.

The hallways were less packed than on the first day of school, but only by a bit. It wasn't very far into the year, so most of the Seniors were still dragging themselves out of bed to get to class. By a few weeks before their cutoff dates, most of them stopped showing up for classes. Chelsea wasn't the only one who inevitable decided it was all pointless. Most of the others, however, decided it significantly after their first year of college.

Avoiding the crowd waiting for the elevator, Chelsea headed down the stairwell. She stopped before the ground floor, instead ducking onto floor two for a pitstop. It was rude not to say goodbye to someone on their cutoff date, even if it hurt. Chelsea paused outside of room 206 before opening the door and peering in.

"Bella?" she asked, waiting until the girl by the window turned around.

A soprano voice answered. "Chelsea, come in."

Before saying anything else, Chelsea couldn't help her eyes glancing at the zero drawn across Bella's whiteboard. Then she cleared her throat. "How are you feeling?"

"You're kidding, right? My step-sister, her daughter turns three in a few days. She asked me twice yesterday if I would play dressup with her then, at her party. She's having a party."

"Your step-sister?" Chelsea asked.

"Magick. So is her kid, lucky thing. Gets to have cake and ice cream instead of counting down to twenty-two."

"I'm sorry, Bell..." Chelsea said, not sure what else she could say.

What does someone tell a doomed person? Bella wasn't the first person Chelsea had visited on their cutoff date, she wouldn't be the last, but she always found herself speechless.

"Yeah, me too. But what can you do?" Bella sighed. "They make the rules, we just live under them."

"It's been fun, though."

"Yeah, don't miss me too much," Bella whispered before pulling Chelsea into a hug. "I don't blame you if you can't come to the service."

"I'll be there. I promise," Chelsea murmured before sighing. "And I don't think I could stop missing you even if I tried."

"Love you, Chel."

"Love you, too," Chelsea whispered before taking a shaky breath and leaving.

More people would be coming in to spend the day with Bella, people who knew her better and loved her more. They would skip their classes and give the middle finger to anyone who tried to stop them. Chelsea, however, needed to go. She had only known the Senior for three or four months; she didn't deserve a place in Bella's last room.

The birds outside had the nerve to chirp as she made her way across campus towards the building next to Trenton Library. If she had been gifted with a few extra minutes, Chelsea might have stopped to throw insults or small rocks at the twittering jerks, but she was close enough on time that it wouldn't be worth it. She wished she was magick, for reasons beyond the obvious, so she could just fling a spell and shut the things up.

But Chelsea didn't even have the hope that someone with a bit more magick in them would find the birds as annoying as she did. Unlike a year before, when she could have relied on one of the more violent magick boys in her grade to take the birds on as a target, it was all mundanes now. Just a campus full of the most depressing people on the planet, each wandering around in one of the stages of grief.

"Chelsea, how's life?" One of her classmates was waiting by the door to English, leaning against the wall. Chelsea struggled to recall his name.

"You know, still living," Chelsea muttered, walking straight past him and into the room. He darted after her.

He continued tailing her before taking the seat next to hers in the lecture hall. "Why're you all grumpy? Pass up someone's funeral to be here?"

The way he said it made Chelsea bristle, and she whipped around to face him. "I very well could have! You can't joke about that kind of stuff, it isn't elementary school anymore."

The boy's face fell a bit, and he held up both hands in surrender before starting to unpack pens and a binder from his bag. "I didn't mean anything by it, honest. I was just trying to make you laugh, is all. I kinda... Well, I was wondering if you might want to go to a thing tonight, thought getting you to crack a smile would lighten the mood."

Chelsea raised an eyebrow before sighing and rolling her eyes. There were worse things to do to ignore grief. "What's the thing, then?"

"A party. One of the dorms to the West has a whole group of Seniors that want to go out with a bang, so they snuck in a bunch of stuff. It's gonna be wild," the boy said, looking at Chelsea expectantly.

She stole a glance at the corner of his notebook and saw the name scrawled messily there. "Yeah, okay. Sounds good, Evan. So I'll see you there, or—"

"I'll pick you up if you want. Walking alone at night sucks and it doesn't start until like eight."

"Okay, I'm at dorm C," Chelsea said before grabbing her class notebook. Their professor would start speaking in less than a minute. He was never off-schedule.

Class passed as quickly as any monotone lecture possibly can, Chelsea playing on her phone underneath her desk while a magick man of about fifty talked about analyzing the Iliad early on in his career. He was a guest professor. Mostly they learned from videos or old books, but once a week an awkward greying man accustomed to magick kids at his magick school came stumbling in and lectured at them. Every few minutes he would stammer over a slip-of-the-tongue comment about their future careers. Maybe someone would be upset, if anyone were actually listening.

By the time he dismissed them, Chelsea had folded the upper right hand corner of every page in her class notebook, fidgeting in her seat. And yet, as the class flowed out of the hall, Chelsea found herself at a blank of what to do. There was required reading for homework, but she had decided a week back that it was useless, and they were never so much as asked about it. She had a music class later in the evening but was not very interested in actually attending. And the dorms? She couldn't go back and trust herself not to wind up in Bella's room again, which wasn't fair for Bella. Chelsea glanced down at her watch. It was two forty-eight, so Bella had just over nine hours left. It wouldn't be right for Chelsea to crash the room.

After a bit, Chelsea found herself wandering with a group of students she vaguely recognized towards an old cafe. It wasn't a very popular hangout spot due to the rumors that circulated about it, but groups would head there when they didn't want to deal with the flurry of kids seeking caffeine at other shops. A girl at the back of the group caught Chelsea's eye and dropped a few paces back from the rest.

"You heading to the Corner?" she asked, nodding up ahead.

Chelsea shrugged. "Anywhere but class or my room. Got a friend on her cutoff date, need to keep away."

"Not the usual reaction," the girl said, not judgmental, simply observing.

"I guess, but if I go back... I can't just stick my head in for a minute, don't have the self-control. So it's better if I just don't."

The girl nodded. "Understandable. I'm Iris."

"Chelsea. Sorry to drag you away from your friends." Chelsea looked at the crowd ahead of them, the first of the group starting to duck under the cafe's low doorframe and into the building.

Iris shook her head. "I'm just people-watching. I think a few of them were in a class with me at some point, but I wouldn't call us close."

"Oh, your grade, though?"

"Same grade, Seniors. Sorry to burden you with another older friend to go dying on you," Iris said. She laughed dryly before stilling, pausing her gait for half a second before shaking her head a second time, seeming to clear her thoughts. "I'm sorry, bad time. I didn't mean--"

"It's fine, part of life," Chelsea muttered, adjusting her bag before walking into the cafe, Iris following close behind.

If Iris said something in response, it was lost to the sudden noise of the cafe, the scratching of chair feet across the floor and murmuring amongst tables of kids. There were two other groups apart from the one they were tailing, and Chelsea had no difficulty separating them from the rest. One was a small table of boys playing a tabletop game, all of whom looked distinctly annoyed at the sudden influx of people. The other group seemed to have tuned out everything but one another, a small collection of Sophomores and Juniors in a cross-legged circle in the corner.

"Not many people to watch," Chelsea commented to Iris as they walked toward the counter.

"Just has to be the right people." Iris smirked before giving the barista her order.

"What, geek club or the occult over there?" she asked, nodding to the boys at the tabletop game and the circle of kids on the floor. "Or did you mean the crowd you followed here?"

"Doesn't matter, I'll know."

"Cryptic."

Iris shrugged. "I'll see you around, Chelsea."

Just then, the woman at the counter looked around the room. Iris turned her head away, black hair hiding her face, so the barista's eyes swept over her without recognition. "Allie?"

"Fake name? Isn't that a bit childish?" Chelsea frowned, but when she turned back to look at Iris, she was gone.

A moment later, she noticed that the kids from the corner were as well, not a trace of their circle in sight. Chelsea blinked and turned around, letting out a short breath when she didn't immediately see them. Then she pursed her lips and headed back up to the counter. It was in poor taste for magick kids to sneak onto mundane campuses and mess with people.

"Caramel macchiato," Chelsea told the woman, smiling quickly.

She continued to scan the cafe while she waited for her drink and paid, eventually sighing and shaking her head.

"Ridiculous."

Chelsea shuffled over to nearer the place the circle had been sitting and leaned against the wall. Where was the thrill in sneaking onto a mundane campus? On another day she would have laughed that some magick with their whole life ahead of them would actually find it entertaining to sneak into a crowd of doomed kids. Today, however, she let her head fall back against the wall. It thunked against something hollow.

There was a faded woven rug directly behind her, hanging on the wall of the cafe, but that didn't account for the sound. Glancing to the side to double-check that the barista was still absorbed in her work, Chelsea peeled back the edge of the rug. Not waiting for someone to notice her, the moment she saw the edge of a doorway waiting behind the rug, she tore it back and dashed through. The door closed harder behind her than she had intended, and she winced as she heard the thud. Taking a deep breath, she waited one second, two seconds, three seconds, expecting the woman working the counter to come running. Still, silence.

Chelsea waited one more moment just to be sure, glancing up at the water-stained ceiling and taking a deep breath. She ventured forward as her stomach boiled, full of nerves coupled with determination. She was no James Bond, but perhaps she could bring a little justice to those magick kids, startle them a little. The hallway extended a good twenty feet, both walls flanked by either old pipes or even older wallpaper, peeling from its aging foundation. Although it was fairly warm, a definite heat coming from one of the extended pipes, Chelsea shivered. Then she heard feet shuffling.

"Because we have to trust you," a voice said in a whisper. Chelsea felt that she might recognize the voice, but it was so quiet.

"But we can't--" a boy answered loudly, sounding very near. Chelsea stopped suddenly, pressing her back against the wall. Someone hushed him. "But we can't do that. We'd get killed."

The first voice responded, "Perhaps, if you were caught. But your time is running out even now, and think about the good it might do."

Now Chelsea was certain--this was Iris. But what was some magick chick doing preaching to a group of goth kids in a dark hallway?

"Look, I know your intentions are nice, but..."

"Don't patronize me," Iris hissed. "We're bigger than you. Either leave now, or commit."

Complete silence. Then a door creaked open, letting light flood into the far-most end of the hallway. Chelsea bit her lip and stayed where she was as the door closed then opened and closed once more. When it clicked shut the second time, the hallway fell into silence once more. Continuing to worry at her lip, Chelsea crept forward through the once-again dimly-lit hall, peering around the corner before walking into the empty space Iris and the students must have been. She could feel eyes watching her.

Without waiting to see if someone might come out of the shadows, Chelsea darted out the back door, holding onto the strap of her bag possessively. The daylight was nearly blinding, and by the time she could see again, there was no one in sight. Iris had fled back to her world, apparently done trying to recruit mundane kids for whatever intentions she had.

Layla would certainly have had a theory about the magick coming to wreak havoc on the mundane campuses, but Chelsea was tired of this. All her snooping had been for nothing and it was nearing a reasonable time to go take a nap or something. Her plan was to keep herself away from thinking for as long as possible after Bella was gone, and her preferred methods were either sleeping or partying. The party started at eight, so she could sleep until then.

Chelsea ran up to her dorm room to drop off her bag, pointedly placing one foot in front of another so she wouldn't stray from her path and towards Bella. Then she walked out to the bench in front of her building and laid down, grateful that the relatively warm rays of sun meant she needed nothing but a light jacket. No blanket. No bag. She even left her phone in her room. Evan would be there at eight, she would zone out until then. Her plan was to not sleep much that night, so this was her preemptive action on the matter.