A Sea Breeze Migraine
A cloud of artificial fragrance hit Troy like a brick in the face, and he barely avoided a cluster of girls blocking half of the congested hall, his stomach knotting. He held his breath, weaving around the edge of their giggling blockade, but it was too late. The smell of chemically derived ocean was already lodged in his sinuses, condensing his existing headache and driving a spike deep behind his left eye.
The last thing he needed was a migraine.
“That’s him, isn’t it?” one of the girls hissed.
“Oh, the new guy!”
“He’s hot.”
“Shut up! He’ll hex you! Musical hexes are no joke.”
“Doesn’t change the fact that he’s hot.”
“My cousin said…”
Their tittering faded into the rest of the chatter as he pushed onward, ignoring the burn climbing his neck. He flexed his fingers in and out to try and get rid of the tingle that was building in his palms.
He needed outside. Just a few deep breaths of fresh air.
“Seriously?” a massive dude in a disheveled uniform laughed to his friend. “What’s the big deal with this music kid everybody’s talking about anyway?”
Their shoulders caught as they passed, the dude not even reacting as he continued on, the impact rattling Troy’s brain. He fought to pull in a slow breath, the spike growing, the tingle of his palms spreading down his fingers.
He focused on the double doors at the end of the hall, glaring sunshine catching in the glass panes. Or were those stars in his vision?
Fresh air. Never in his life had he craved fresh air like this, and he wrenched his tie looser. The voices blurred together, a cacophony pressing in.
He didn’t want to be here. In this hallway. In this school. In this city. Yet, what choice did his parents have after finding out their kid had the rarest magic known to man? It’s not as if-
A shriek cut above the din. Normal teenage shenanigans, but the pitch was perfectly wrong, an invisible hammer driving the spike deep into his brain, the stars starting to spin.
“Shoot. This is bad,” he mumbled, clutching the side of his head, his backpack slipping off his shoulder and jerking as it caught in his elbow.
“What’s bad?” a voice asked, something vaguely resembling a girl beside him, though he could really only see her lower half through the stars, red shoes falling into step with him. “Um, are you okay? You don’t look so good.”
“Not good,” he huffed, giving up on his backpack and letting it hit the floor.
He fell into the door, stomach lurching as he pushed against the bar.
Hot wind washed over him, his skin prickling at the sudden shift in temperature, and he stumbled, palms and knees striking the searing pavement.
Air in. Air out. Air in. Air out.
His skin prickled more. No, it wasn’t the temperature. It was his magic, flaring out from the blinding stars and throbbing pain within his head, vibrations dancing across his skin.
“No. Please no.”
A counter tempo began to resonate in the concrete, buzzing beneath him.
“Hey, kid!” Red tennis shoes hurried to his side. “You need me to call the nurse or-“
“Get them out!” he croaked, harmonies starting to ring in the bike rack to his right, moving outward into the metal frames around the doors and into the rebar buried in the concrete walls. “Pull the fire alarm. Get them out before-“
He fought back the acid climbing his throat, thirds and fifths layering in new octaves in the blistering air around him, the ground rumbling.
“Get them out. Before I bring the building down.”
