Free The Dig by Audrey Hart Page A

burst, and the mound of dirt is blown away. I scramble up, coughing, and watch as the dirt fans out in a massive hundred-foot-radius blast.

    I inhale the fresh air, wiping the dirt from my mouth. Wow. Creusa is right. I really should learn how my powers work. I don‘t know if I just dug myself out with sheer will or if my lungs have some kind of new magical force.

    Spying a leaf on the ground, I take a deep breath and blow at it as hard as I can.

    The leaf just sits there.

    Again I stare at it, but this time I imagine the leaf flying away from me.

    And the moment I do, a little carpet of dirt beneath the leaf lifts it up and carries it off.

    Okay, universe. I get it. I control dirt and rocks and soil…but that‘s it. No superbreath here.
    I‘m still the same girl who can barely blow up a balloon or put out seventeen candles on a cake. I‘m still me.

    Or am I? The frustration over not knowing where my powers come from is really getting to me. Why can I suddenly manipulate earth? There has to be a reason. I‘m willing to concede that magic exists—I did just party with a nymph—but why can I do it? Why not those villagers? What makes me so special all of a sudden? I‘ve never been special before. Not unless you call being an outcast special.

    Hang on, I think, brushing aside some dirt to reveal the small silver bar that caused the underground volcano of dirt. Not bad, Zoe. I hold it in my palm, admiring the weight of it. Just as I‘m preparing to use my powers and sculpt the silver into a necklace, I catch my reflection in the metal. I gasp in shock. My face is covered in dirt. And above it, my hair looks filthy and knotted into crazy curls. It‘s a warbled view and I can‘t look away, but I had better stop staring or I‘m going to turn into some kind of narcissist.

    There are two versions of the Narcissus story. In both versions, Narcissus is a hunter who people just worship because of how hot he is. And he goes around treating everyone in this arrogant, dismissive manner. He looks down on them because they aren‘t as good-looking. In one version, this goddess Nemesis is just fed up with Narcissus, so she draws him toward a lake.
    Narcissus sees his reflection in the water and is so taken with his beauty that he can do nothing but stare at his face in the water, unable to eat or drink, until he eventually dies. In the other version, Narcissus commits suicide because he‘s devastated by the realization that he can never fully connect with the stunning beauty he sees in the water because, well, it‘s him.

    I‘ve always preferred the version where he sort of dehydrates and starves to death. It makes more sense to me. After all, that‘s what I see happening every day in the girls‘ bathroom at Greeley. All the girls in my dorm—the jocky ones who are always in sneakers, the hipster ones with earbuds permanently in their ears, the preppy popular girls who brandish flatirons morning, noon and night—they all stand in the bathroom and lean over the sinks and study themselves in the mirror. It doesn‘t matter who the girl is, even Patricia Something oro ther, who‘s always putting up flyers about starving children and human trafficking and won‘t drink the milk in the cafeteria because of cows‘ rights, well, she‘s just as passionate about zit cream as Victoria Whatserface, whose vanity case is bigger than my duffel bag. Anyway, almost all the girls who don‘t socialize outside the bathroom seem to speak the same language in the bathroom. Only I can‘t speak the language, and I don‘t want to. I just want to sneak in with my toothbrush, toothpaste and the other bare essentials and sneak out. And you couldn‘t pay me to stare at myself for an hour every morning and an hour every night.

    And this is why I don‘t understand the ancient Greeks. Why is Narcissus a boy when there is no creature on earth more narcissistic than a junior girl at Greeley who subscribes to Allure and treats her face like