I'm taking a course in Psychic Space Building. It's held in the Psychic Space Building.

It's one of those "practical" classes that the other students look down on. Naturally Jethro is in it, just because he's so contrary, but he hardly shows up to class.

But I'm really digging it. I figure it's going to be more useful to have "real" skills rather than just purely theoretical stuff that maybe you can get hired doing, along with another 1200 psychic yuppies, like Economic Forecasting, Cultural Manipulation, and Dream Nudging.

Like, did you know... the conical form of the traditional Christmas Tree is a model for psychic space building? Picture how it's bigger on the bottom, but gets narrower at the top? Naturally, it's because the bottom is older, so its branches have had longer to grow. But your effects in time are like that too - what you do (and has been done to you) has bigger ripples the longer ago that it was. But today's ripples, though small, will be those bigger ripples in the future. Which is something we all tend to forget.

So that's the kind of thing we learn about building in the psychic space shop.

Jethro introduced me to a Gate salesman. It seems they're a dying breed. Jethro works for him in the summers on the Fence Pole Circuit. That's what's left of the old Deadhead network, but even back in the day the Deadheads didn't have a monopoly on the Gates. Now it's mostly the Psych thing - people traveling to psychedelic rock festivals across the globe, looking for transport. Jethro's Gate Guy can usually get them inside the shows themselves - a cave at Red Rocks, behind some trees at the Greek, out of a broom closet at the First Avenue. Jethro makes good money in the summer escorting drugged-out hippies through the Gates. They pay up front, and tip with their own crafty work - dreamcatchers, sigils, potions and elixirs. Then Jethro turns around and sells those too. So he just travels around all summer.

Though he's still in high school, just like me, Jethro doesn't seem to have parents he has to check in with.

I promised myself I wouldn't hang out with Jethro. He just seemed like unnecessary trouble. He'd be captain of the Mayan Mind Wrestling team -- if he could just make it to practice. Instead he lifts weights, or runs his ridiculous rituals, or tends his pet snakes, of a lot of other weird stuff I didn't care about or have time for.

But we've got Distant History together, and he asked if I wanted to be his lab partner. He is really good with science, so I figured he'd totally know how to run the Fractal Perspicillum. I said sure.

We were supposed to study today but instead Jethro suggested we go down to some spot on the river he found. And Tabitha was there - turns out she's his girlfriend. We watched her trying out different colors of flame till it turned dark. Then we went back to the dorms.

On rainy days people turn inward: into their rooms, into their minds. The dorms are full of wormholes and ghost gates, the smell of ozone and magic herbs. Jethro is standing in the rain in his underwear in the grass outside, trying to open some portal with a converted PS4 and a big handful of Silene Capensis, Daikenchuto, and Hell Money, but he's having trouble keeping it lit. Sure is making a lot of smoke though.

No way I was going get any work done in the dorms on a day like today, so I grabbed my laptop, put on the scarf, and headed for the Spoonbender (the on-campus student-run coffee shop). The wi-fi is spotty, the food is stale, but it's cheap. Right now I'm sitting across the table from Tabitha Grun, who isn't really the best choice for a study partner, but when I look at her with my glasses on I can see her as a flaming wood nymph. Which is a really great perk of hanging out in the Spoonbender.

First week at school and I'm loving it here. My room is on the top floor of the tallest, dopest dorm. It's a quad, but only three roommates, and one of them is never here (at his girlfiends?) and the other one is invisible and really really tiny.

My window looks out over the whole campus - the school buildings, the playing fields and gardens, down to the woods... The leaves are turning color and the wind is kicking up. Which is perfect weather for me to be wearing my lucky scarf and sunglasses. Together they make everything as smooth as glass, and rainbow prisms too.

It's a beautiful time to be alive.