never have nothing to say [mr. salinger]

“Okay,” Gideon said, realising that he had probably just said something that Adam found rather stupid. He could tell that a film that was fifty years old would not be shown at the cinemas now but how did a teenager know it then? Television! It just dawned on him that no-majs had such a fun box  in their living rooms that showed films too. Well, was it even a box anymore? He had seen some that looked almost like picture frames on a socket. Gideon figured that this all complicated the matter enough for him to give up on the plan of watching the film, after all.

It was a little disappointing that Adam was not one of the students who were excited to try joke potions that had only just been released. Gideon enjoyed creating these potions and was always happy when he got through the testing stage well and could actually earn some extra money with his little inventions. It was not badly needed but more money was better than less money in any case.

Gideon had tried the potion himself, had given it to other to try and he knew exactly what it did. Hence he wasn't too interested in watching Adam taking a sip but looked around to check if he had maybe forgotten to take some precautions. Had he looked closer at the boy though, he would have advised him to take off his rucksack. As it was he only noticed it as Adam already drifted towards the ceiling.

“No, you most certainly are not turning blue,” Gideon said, not quite sure why Adam was asking and wondering what made a person turn blue. Coldness… well, that wasn't a problem here. If he was feeling sick he wouldn't turn blue and the Potioneer most certainly didn't think that it would make his potion any more fun if it also changed the colour of people. Then again, maybe this was an idea for a future potion. A kind of 'reveal your true colours' potion. He'd have to think about that more.

“Let me help you with your backpack,” Gideon said and raised his wand to remove the additional weight from the boy and let it slowly float down to the floor. “So,” he asked a small hint of excitement in his voice, “how is it?”

Even if he wasn’t turning blue, he didn’t think he was liking the sensation much. He put his hands on his cheeks just to check that they hadn’t swollen or stretched out or anything -- didn’t weightlessness do that to astronauts? -- but couldn’t register anything wrong, so he quickly let go. Surely weightlessness wouldn’t help acne.

Adam felt like he must look immensely stupid, slowly drifting through the air -- he had no idea what he was meant to be doing with his arms or legs. Standing stiff would be too comical but oh, God, he didn’t particularly want to do any accidental midair swimming. This was embarrassing enough as it was. When he caught up to his roommates he’d just tell them he’d had to clean something.

Mr. Salinger offered to take his bag -- Adam unfolded his arms. Though there was a tug at the straps that suggested Salinger was trying to locomotor it away from him, he didn’t want it yanked off him, so he kept a tight grip on the straps until he’d successfully taken it off. (It felt unreasonably impressive to have managed it midair, even though Adam wasn’t sure whether the being-midair part was actually affecting his mobility much.) The backpack drifted slowly down to the floor.

This begged the question of whether Adam was going to drift slowly down to the floor, or whether he was just going to thunk down. Surely there was a precaution in place for that too, but he regretted not asking earlier. He’d look like a real wimp just thinking of it now that he was midair.

“I dunno,” he said. “Floaty. I think it’s doing weird things to my stomach.” Could you get airsick outside of an airplane? He had never been on a plane, or airsick, before. He thought of asking, but he didn’t get the impression that Salinger had ever been on a plane.

The entire thing just seemed weird and pointless, honestly. Who was this potion marketed toward? Were wizards really in the business of making themselves float just for the hell of it? What else did wizards waste their time on? That was a question he could ask, so he caught himself against a bookshelf and carefully turned himself around to face Salinger: “Is this common for wizards? Like -- potions that do shit like this?”

While Gideon had not expected Adam to be one of those students who took great pleasure from trying a potion like this he had believed that he would have at least a little fun with this. However, as far as he could tell by the way the boy was slowly drifting through the air, not really trying anything and just, well floating, Adam was not enjoying this. In fact, he had a feeling that the boy would rather be elsewhere. His worst suspicion was that his student would prefer a proper detention to this. What was wrong with the youth nowadays?

And then Adam even said that floating did weird things to his stomach. The boy really was little fun and Gideon almost regretted that he hadn’t swallowed some of the potion himself to demonstrate that this could actually be a lot of fun. It was too late now, though.

“I see,” Gideon said, feeling disappointed that his potion wasn’t better received but hiding this emotion behind a smile. “I’m sorry. I guess it’s not for everyone then…” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, wondering if there was the need to add a warning to the description of the potion.

The way Adam used a bookshelf to stead himself in the air and turn to face him made the professor wish that the effect of the potion would lessen already so he would not have to watch his student clearly not enjoying himself for much longer.

“Yes, there’s a market for fun potions,” Gideon answered the boy’s question. “It’s not everybody’s taste, obviously, but there are people who like trying things like that. I’m selling my creations to a joke shop anyway.” He wondered if Adam would like any of his joke potions and tried to remember which ones he had given students to try in classes that Adam had attended and if the boy had felt equally unamused then.

“Well, it shouldn’t take long anymore until gravity will do its job again.” he offered, hoping that Adam would be happy to hear that at least. It was funny how the effect lessened slowly. He’d be able to stand on firm ground soon but still feel a lot lighter than usual for a brief time at least. Gideon personally liked this feeling in particular, thinking that it was very pleasant.

I guess it’s not for everyone then. Adam had just enough self control not to say, no shit. He had never seen the appeal in being midair, though -- he thought he’d feel the same way about skydiving. Did wizards skydive? There was no way they didn’t, he decided -- if his time at Ilvermorny had taught him one thing, it was that wizards loved needless, reckless danger.

But still -- even needless, reckless danger seemed to have a different flavor with wizards than it did where he was from. His mom complained all the time about how he was going to kill himself or break his legs skating but -- like -- that was a skill, that was something he had worked hard at, and if he did break his legs skating, they couldn’t be mended overnight with a potion at a no-maj hospital, so he was careful what he did.

Maybe that was the missing link he kept turning over in his head, the fundamental difference between magic and nonmagic: the effort necessary to do things. You could cook with magic so easily, but where was the artistry in that? Poor wizards had to eke out their creativity by learning fancy ways to fly or making potions that made you float around. No wonder all their shit was insane. No wonder there was a market for joke potions.

“Wack,” he said. “Bet it’s easier just selling drugs.” There probably were potions for that, he realised an instant later -- not, of course, that they’d ever learn about them  in Salinger’s class.

Salinger warned him that gravity would kick back in soon -- Adam let go of the bookshelf and pinwheeled one arm quickly to keep from flipping in any direction, bracing himself in anticipation of the drop. He’d jumped off of tall things before; it couldn’t be that different. “Why you made the dosage so small?” he said, “Five minutes seems real short. Like, what could you do in midair for five minutes?” Obviously he hadn’t really tried anything, but if he was starting to sink already, he couldn’t see how he possibly could have.

“Well, selling drugs would be illegal,” Gideon said, smirking. “I’d show you how to brew some good stuff in class but…” he shook his head in a seemingly apologetic way, “it would not be a good idea to teach students how to do that, would it? Could cost me my job, too. I could, however, do some drug prevention stuff,” he went on thoughtfully.

Truth be told, Gideon went off on that tangent just to spare himself to focus on how Adam was clearly not enjoying himself up in the air. Besides the boy had a point - drugs might appeal to some students and it might be sensible to let them try things in safe surroundings. He could let them try some mind-altering potions and have antidotes at the ready so they’d leave his classroom again being entirely sober.

How he’d turn that into a drug prevention lesson, however, was something he still needed to figure out. Gideon, at least, was not opposed to alcohol and drugs were just one step further. Maybe he’d need to add something to the potion that made it less enjoyable. It was something to consider and he figured he might ask Ricky for advice. Then again, asking Ricky meant that his idea would probably end up being dismissed altogether.

Adam was apparently preparing himself to sink down again and had more questions to offer that distracted Gideon from his drug prevention lesson plan. “If you take two sips or more you stay in the air longer,” the potioneer explained. “In the testing phase we have tried how it is if you take another sip when you’re already in the air for a while. It works just fine to prolong the effect. However, for a first try I think one sip and approximately five minutes are enough. You need to get a feel for it, after all.”

He looked at the boy, wondering if his question about the dosage meant that he did at least enjoy it a little after all. “I could, of course, also change it in a way that with one sip you stay in the air for longer but the thing is that the higher dosage led to quite different results, meaning that some people spent twenty minutes in the air and one unfortunate chap was up there five hours. He did not enjoy that so much.” Gideon didn’t want to add any detail as to what his guinea pig had said during and after the test. Yet, this experience had reassured him that a smaller dosage was ultimately better than a larger one.

See -- you didn’t get shit like this in San Jose. If Adam had told a chemistry teacher to make drugs at the high school his cousin went to, he’d have gotten detention for the rest of his life, and then his mom would have slaughtered him in cold blood when he got home. That was the way high school was supposed to be. What the hell was wrong with wizards? (By now, he’d decided, this had to be representative of magical society and not just Salinger. It wasn’t like Salinger was the only professor Adam suspected had been raised by wizard hippies.)

Drug prevention was more like it -- “Scare tactics,” suggested Adam sagely. His cousin’s school had, to hear Derek tell it, faked some student drunk-driving deaths to showcase the consequences of reckless behavior, so when Adam and Derek had gotten drunk in the skate park Derek had made them walk back home and it’d taken them forty-five minutes (because they’d been sloshed. Obviously, the fake death hadn’t deterred Derek from drinking.)

But whatever. If Salinger wanted to waste his time telling teenagers not to do teenager things, that wasn’t Adam’s problem. He was grateful this had lasted a few minutes instead of five entire hours; he couldn’t have made small talk with a professor for that long. “What happened when he had to like, pee?” he said, not really caring about the answer -- he was only about three feet off the ground now, and still going down.

The potion had worn off only gradually, and Adam realised a moment later that this had the unpleasant effect that even when his feet were on the ground, he didn’t feel like it -- he got his backpack and put it back on in case it helped (it did, but only a little.) He switched from foot to foot for a moment, trying to get his land legs back -- he felt like he was standing on the moon or something, like he was still half balloon. (He made a mental note to check in the bathroom that his face was its normal shape before he went back to Wampus.)

God, this was awkward -- he wished, again, that he’d just had to clean something. He’d have taken a letter home at this point. He gripped the straps of his backpack for dear life and blurted “If that’s all, I’m gonna go.” He had meant to thank Salinger for not putting him in detention but he was no longer sure he was grateful for it; when he tried to swing his way around the desks, the movement almost sent him airborne again -- he was more careful when he opened the door, and shut it behind him.

[out]

“Yeah,” Gideon said with only little conviction in his voice. He was almost as much against scare tactics as he was against the concept of detention. He felt that negative things with negativity wasn’t the way to go. In his opinion young people needed to find their own ways without being bullied into them. After all too much pressure often resulted in the contrary of what had been aimed for.

“Maybe I’ll go for that,” he finally said more to himself than to Adam. If students thought about drugs, as was proven by the fact that Adam brought the topic up in the first place, he could not close his eyes and ignore it. He needed to do something about it one way or another. He’d figure something out.

“I see you realised why he did not enjoy floating for so long…” Gideon responded to Adam’s question, unwilling to share the details of this very unfortunate event. The wizard had never volunteered to test any of Gideon’s potions again after that.

Adam had ‘landed’ again by now and still seemed to feel uncomfortable. The professor decided not to worry too much about it, though. There were always some people who did not like joke potions. They didn’t have to. He was not always in the mood for them either. However, it was a nice additional income to invent and produce them.

“Yeah, sure,” Gideon said, a slight smile spreading across his face as Adam announced that he’d leave now. Maybe the floating potion had distracted Adam at least enough to get over his previous issues with his housemate. If he learned to take things more lightly then he had at least achieved something today.

[end]