Remedial Magic by Jenna Black Page A

me the one on the bottom left when I was ten, right before she left for Faerie,” I explained, gesturing at the rather ordinary-looking brown bear with its button eyes and plaid bowtie. There was nothing particularly special about it, but it was the last tie I had to my mother, and that made it precious.  Afraid to look at Dee Dee, I plucked the bear off the shelf and fidgeted with his bowtie. “It has sentimental value, but my dad somehow decided that because I liked this one, I must love teddy bears.”  I grimaced at this further evidence of how little my dad actually saw me. “Now he gets me a teddy bear for my birthday and Christmas every year.” Worse, Ethan had picked up the habit, too, so my closet was full of the bears that wouldn’t fit on the shelves.
    I risked a glance at Dee Dee and was relieved she wasn’t giving me a pitying or condescending look.
    “Why don’t you just tell him the truth?” she asked, quite reasonably.
    I shrugged and put my mother’s bear back on the shelf. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve just let it go on too long already.” But actually, I did know, and it was a whole lot more pathetic than that. I didn’t want to tell Dad I didn’t like the bears because I was too grateful for the scraps of affection he threw my way. So I displayed the bears proudly on my bedroom wall, even though they embarrassed me. How messed up is that?
    Dee Dee let the subject drop, for which I was grateful, then moved to sit cross-legged on my bed, beckoning me to follow. I sat facing her, my nerves flaring again at the thought of demonstrating my incompetence.
    “Where would you say your main problem lies?” she asked me. “Is it with gathering the magic or with commanding it?”
    There are two steps to casting a successful spell. The first is to pull magic to you. The more magic you can pull, the more powerful a spell you can cast. Once you’ve pulled in the magic, you have to communicate to it what you want it to do. Traditionally, that’s the hard part. You’re trying to communicate with a force that isn’t quite sentient and doesn’t speak any language known to mankind. In fact, the words you speak to cast a spell are irrelevant, kind of like the commands you use when you’re training a dog. You can train a dog to sit when you say “hippopotamus” if you want to, and it’s the same with magic.
    “I suck at both of them,” I admitted reluctantly. I can manage the basic spells any Fae child can do, but anything above that is out of my league.
    Dee Dee frowned. “Well, I suppose if you have trouble gathering a lot of magic, you haven’t had a chance to try more complex commands. Maybe if we give you enough magic to work with, you’ll have an easier time commanding it.”
    “I guess,” I conceded, though I wasn’t completely convinced. It seemed I had more trouble than most commanding even the scant amount of magic I could pull, and it was hard to imagine adding more magic to the mix was going to help. Still, if Dee Dee thought it might work, I was willing to try.
    “Is there a particular spell you’d like to work on? One you don’t have enough oomph to carry off?”
    There were a lot of them, but one in particular leapt to mind. “Telekinesis.” It was one of those spells that Ethan was ridiculously good at. The jerk could lift a freaking car with just a couple of muttered words, and it was easy for him. I, on the other hand, couldn’t even pick up a pencil reliably.
    Dee Dee brightened. “Oh, that one’s kind of easy,” she said.
    I winced, because, of course, I knew it was easy. Or at least should be.
    Dee Dee laughed and waved her hand at me. “I didn’t mean it like that. I mean it’s easy for me to help with.”
    “Oh.”
    “Why don’t you go ahead and pull as much magic as you can. Then I’ll pull some more and feed it to you so you can cast the spell. Maybe try to bring your mother’s teddy bear over—it’s light and it has sentimental value, so that