"No?" says Julie, bewildered. "Pretty sure that wouldn't help. Maybe in twenty years you'll feel like giving it a whirl but no way we'd still be making medical decisions for you by then."

Okay. (She eases up on the clinging, a little.)

They can't make her, anyway. She does have a third spell, it's this -

"- ooh," says Julie. "I was completely prepared to believe you were stuck at two, your second's really good and you're wearing pants, but that's a handy third."

Yeah. Saved her life, probably. All three of them are really good but that's the one that got her out.

"You think you would have died there?" asks Winona.

Close enough, anyway. She doesn't know what happens to magical girls who don't get out, but being drugged up and taken away isn't good news. Or she would have been a cryptid, she wasn't going to stop trying until she could get out.

"Should look into that..." murmurs Winona, very softly.

That would be good.

"I will." Snug.

It's a wan, exhausted smile, that that gets out of her, but it is one.

They can all sit there like that for a bit quietly then.

Yeah, that's good.

She should tell them more about it sometime, she sends, eventually. Not right now, but sometime, so they understand.

School isn't just going to be a problem because it's scary - things got worse for her every time they decided she could do something, so she stopped letting them think she could do new things. They gave up on teaching her anything but little-kid stuff after a while. And she couldn't read to learn stuff; they didn't know she could, and it would have been really bad if they found out.

"Why would it have been bad if they knew you could read?" asks Julie.

Usually if they figured out she could do something they'd decide it meant she could do other things that she couldn't really, and then they'd hurt her trying to get her to do those other things. Like, she can't write for the same reason she can't talk, she doesn't remember the words the right way, but if they'd known she could read they would probably have tried to make her do it anyway.

"Okay. A school with good disability accommodation won't be like that."

They can't touch her if she doesn't let them and they don't get to take her food away if Winona and Julie don't let them, and she doesn't think they will; nothing's going to be like that any more.

"- your food?" says Julie.

Yeah, that was a thing. They kept a lot of the kids hungry all the time so they could bribe them with food to do things. She figured out how to mostly make that stop working on her but it was pretty bad anyway.

"- might need to talk to somebody about how that'll affect your metabolism, in case you're gonna need weird multivitamins or something," says Julie. "What were they even trying to bribe you to do? You're not a circus elephant."

Look at people the right way. Talking exercises. Math and stuff.

"I'm gonna go call Doc Chen," Julie says, getting up. "See what needs doing about that which being magic doesn't fix."

She resumes clinging.

Winona hugs her. Julie walks out of the room to make the call.

She clings and doesn't panic.

"Is there something we might as well know now about you and doctors?" Winona asks.