One last year. Only one. Last chance. All day every day was spent studying. Every day Inyanga and Amafu would take their schoolbooks and the lunches their omama had made for them and eat in the playground outside their school, Ato Praimari.

Or technically, both girls ate Amafu's lunch together, because every day Amafu's lunches were a magic cast feast, grilled sandwiches with melted cheese and braai burned meat, oily fried potatoes, sausages with chilies, and steaming hot egg tarts or soft flaky pastries for dessert. Then they would swing by the grayscale homeless who begged on the corner to give away the mundane lunch umama Inyanga insisted on packing — sweet corn bread that went stale within hours, with burned grilled sausage that got stone cold and rock hard — even though Auntie Star always sent enough magic cast deliciousness for two growing girls.

At times their books took on oil stains. If Amafu brought them home, the Lizulu family's cleaner would magic the food smudges and crumbs clean again. Half their class went to eat lunch on Frons street most days, buying more magic goodies with their allowance; the other half would hang out in the playground, studying at the tables in the pristine weather, and beg Amafu to trade.

"Hey Lizzard, I got plantain chips today!" Iwu would call from another table in the shade. "Still warm, how many do you want for a slice of salsciccia?"

"A big slice or a thin slice?" Amafu would call back. "Gimme seven chips."

"A big slice."

"Oh, that'll be eleven chips then."

Several days a week, Yanyu would come back from the pizzeria on Frons and make an offer, always the same one: "Hey Ama, want a slice of pizza?"

"A whole slice? How do you have extra?" Amafu would ask as if she didn't already know.

"Auntie Amber owns the pizza place." Even though she had said it a hundred times. "She always gives me extra." As if they had never had this conversation before.

"So spoiled," Amafu would say, and then she would accept the trade.

"Hey Ama, want some taco? Wanna go bite for bite of your grilled cheese?" Sahan might say.

"What's in it?"

"Calabaza squash and peppers."

Sometimes Venus would stay for lunch and say, "Hey Ama, want some grapes?"

"The red ones? Yuck, nope, I don't like red grapes. They make my mouth taste dry."

Lunch talk always sounded the same. First negotiations over food, then silent munching, then reading textbooks and studying and scribbling answers to homework questions, which got progressively louder as the students began discussing important discoveries and answers to problems.

Today, lunch-time study was interrupted, and not for the first time, by the instantaneously sudden appearance of their teacher, Maestra Alma. One second the students discussed astrophysics from the seats of a cluster of round tables, and the next, Maestra Alma stood in the middle of the space between the tables, inches from knocking into Sahan as she tried to give Iwu her Introduction to Mundane Astronomy textbook back.

Alma did this all the time, coming mere inches from pushing her students and sending them flying as the matter of her body displaced the air around her.

"I have exciting news! Last minute, marvelous news! You're going to love this. I booked our class for a magic scavenge! Hold on, I'm going to call the rest of the class so you can all hear at once."

While she caught her breath, the maestra sat down at the slide, at the bottom, so the little primary children going down it couldn't do so without giving her the boot. A round portal appeared in midair, floating like a compact mirror, and she spoke into it, projecting loudly enough for the thirteen students present in the yard to hear too. "Good afternoon! An exciting announcement for all final year students!"

Today Yanyu hadn't got back to the schoolyard yet. The message portal surprised her as she sat in a pizzeria chewing down a cheesy, saucy lunch. Sitting in front of a mirror that ran along the wall, she didn't notice the link hovering before her, because it too reflected back her face — so when Maestra Alma's voice shouted "Good afternoon!" Yanyu screamed and dropped her slice.

A delicious gooey dream lay shattered and splattered on the pizzeria floor. Luckily Amber, Yanyu's adoring aunt, did own the place, and today the free bonus slice was presented to her within seconds, at the wave of a wand — another wave cleaned up the mess. "You would think a simple time reversal spell would be the most logical fix here," said Auntie Amber, wiping an angular knife-like gnomon wand clean on a white apron as if it had gotten pizza sauce on it. "But do you have a clue how much they charge for any kind of time travel? Uh uhn. Better to conjure up a whole new slice out of the ideal than to turn back time even by ten seconds."

Out of the link, Maestra Alma's voice said, "I got the entire class booked for a field trip, I hope you're all excited!"

Her words surprised Venus on the toilet. Venus just shook her head, finished and pulled up her pants, washed her hands, and muttered into the link in the empty air before her, even though it was a one-way speaker through which no one could hear. "Only Maestra Alma. Only this maestra lacks the decency to make an appointment before calling. It's not even an emergency!"

Ahihia needed to take an omnibus every lunch time to escort her little sister home for the afternoon — largely because little Aja was afraid of heights. As the omnibus took flight, joining the traffic taking off between the tallest stories of landed edifices and below the bottoms of levitating skyscrapers, the sisters would eat pre-lunch snacks: carrots with humus, apple slices with nut butter, or spiced tortilla chips. The shyest girl in school, Ahihia asked her sister about her morning in a whisper, as if the passengers next to her would find Aja's stories of learning to read and write scandalous. "I always draw 5 backwards! Am I left handed? Maybe if I put the pens in my left hand the 5 will go the front way. I want to write with my left hand."

The little first grader talked full volume, and Ahihia replied in a low voice, "I do not think that is how it works." 

Just then Maestra Alma's link had appeared, interrupting the conversation, and caused what felt like all the eyes on the bus to steer toward the girls. Ahihia sunk lower and lower in her seat.

"The entire class will be participating in a magic scavenge! High performance may provide an opportunity for winning candidates to transfer into an advanced pre-magic program at another primary, so I encourage all students hoping to gain admittance to magicians' college next year to apply yourselves. Winners will likely receive top consideration for a place at Constellation Universidad!"

To Ahihia's complete mortification, the other passengers on the bus exploded into a round of applause and cheering. For her. Rooting her on. The passenger in the next seat, a luminously youthful woman surrounded by glimmering starweave bags of groceries, put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Good luck, dear," and Ahihia wanted to disappear into a hole through the bottom of the bus, even if she didn't know any flying spells yet.

Esperanza didn't mind getting calls when she ate alone, so the maestra's link made her smile from her perch on the roof of a small old school mundane optometry business. Up there, she would eat lunches packed by her mother — her favorite, a bagel and schmear — and occasionally push glasses purchased at the store below back up her nose.

Ever since she discovered the fire escape ladder reached the ground, when she crossed into the backyard of the building from her own house's backyard, this had become her spot. When she went to Primaria Cinco, until last year, two friends had come up here with her after dark, and they used to talk about dropping water bubbles or magic eggs on passersby. They never got up the guts, though.

Now she was alone, and she ate by herself while looking down on pedestrian traffic and ground motos, and up at flying traffic, day dreaming of taking the girl she liked up here, if she could ever get up the nerve. The maestra's announcement did sound exciting.

"Here's the best part, are you ready for this? The magic scavenge will take place on the set of movie director Mirai Ossani's new picture, Early Dawn! Competitions will include a race to calculate the coordinates of Directora Ossani's camera link angles, record scenes using theoretical time travel schemas, and identify magical solutions for real world problems like captioning, sound editing, special effects, and more!" It took a moment for Esperanza to realize a grin had spread from ear to ear.

Not because she wanted to go to magicians' college or become a director mágica, she just loved movies. She wished she could be an actor. She had imagined a character she would create and pictured the same character, in many variations, in hundreds of movies she watched. Acting, however, wasn't for her. She'd tried. She got nervous and could never remember her lines. Yet still, it was her dream to go into movie-making — as a script writer. Today she was going to meet Mirai Ossani — what a once in a lifetime chance!

Iwu listened to the announcement from her spot at the lunch slash study table — furthest from the maestra and the other students. She whispered with her best friend Sahan over the maestra's announcement. "I knew it. My parens knows Directora Ossani's executive producers, and they've been in talks for a magic scavenge on set for months."

The maestra said, "Everyone, on the scheduled day, please arrive at hora prima on the dot, so we can leave together through a link provided by the studio."

Stuffing curry fries into her mouth, Iwu spoke before she had quite finished chewing. "I've been studying for this all week, and practicing the alignment of camera angles one would need to use a link and a time travel spell. I know I can get into pre-magic at Scuola Uno or Due."

There was a hurt glimmer in Sahan's eyes when she said, "Good luck, cheater. How about you shush and listen to the maestra?"

A silence did overtake Iwu, closing her mouth like a solid slap. Then when she recovered from the stun, she leaned in and insisted, "I'm not cheating, I just had advance notice of what to study for. It's my own hard work that will get me a place at Constellation Uni."

Straining to hear Maestra Alma, Sahan leaned away and gave her a dismissive wave. "Maybe your rich parens can get me in too," she said, and when Iwu tried to reply, Sahan picked up her stack of books and walked away. She listened to the rest of Maestra Alma's announcement from a spot standing in the middle of the playground, clutching eight textbooks.

"If anyone insists on cramming, since many already have books on you, a number of subjects may be of help to you: geometry, philosophy of time travel, string theory, astrophysics, and, as always, neuroscience. Magic begins in the mind, I always say, and does not end in the stars. And for some, the best part of this announcement is yet to come! I know how much some of you love touring the Universidad campus, and spending time outside the halls in which you may one day be a student. Well, surprise! Directora Ossani's next movie takes place on campus, so that is where we are heading!"

Immediately, Inyanga and Amafu jumped up and began to clap their hands. The other students looked at them as if they were crazy — for just a second, before they joined in clapping and smiling.

Thank you for reading Inyanga's Star. I am deeply grateful for any stars you have to leave behind, and as always, your thoughts help me to craft a stronger story world! Be well!