Whistling in the Dark

I coughed in the cold air as we walked to the school.

"You should bundle up more. You don't want that to develop into pneumonia," Calliope said.

"It's a short walk and I'm wearing multiple layers," I half-croaked.

"Whatever. Enjoy your fever."

I paused as we walked. One of the snowpiles was being skied down by what looked to be boggarts. Boggarts in touques. And little parkas. They also had set up a boggart T-Bar.

"What?" Calliope asked.

"I think I'm having a fever dream," I said. "I'm seeing skiing boggarts."

"Oh. That's because you're with me. You're seeing the things just out of sight."

"Then there are always skiing boggarts?"

"Don't be silly. It's not always snowing, is it." She waved to the lead boggart, who was himself snowboarding. He did a jump but blew his landing, faceplanting and skidding a ways. Calliope giggled.

"Where did these... beings... come from?" I asked.

Calliope shrugged. "Where does anything come from? Honestly, there are times you humans ask 'how' and 'why' when the only reasonable question is 'when' or 'who.' In any case, you're spending time with your muse in corpus. Naturally, you're walking a more imaginative path than you usually do."

We walked into the classroom building, and started making our way towards my office. "You're my muse?"

"Not exclusively. People don't get to have exclusive muses except in rare situations. Like, Stephen King. He gets Clio Glickman all to himself. Poor girl. He runs her ragged."

"Anyone else get their own muse?"

"Well, Piers Anthony. He gets Erato Keller." Calliope looked rueful. "She looks fourteen, dresses like a slut and does half-assed work at best. No wonder the poor man falls into pedophiliac hackwork at the drop of an a-cup bra."

"I could have gone my whole life without knowing that."

"I know." She giggled. "No one said enlightenment was pleasant.

We rounded a corner, and were confronted by women.

A lot of women.

Women dressed as porn stars, as super heroes, as soccer players stripped to their sports bras. They were milling around outside a classroom door, and most of them looked bored.

"The... Hell?" I asked.

"Mm? Oh. That must be a math class," Calliope said.

"Excuse me? I'm not sure how we can establish that cause and effect."

"Boys, when sitting in advanced math, spend an inordinate amount of time fantasizing about sex. It's the only way they can possibly make it through. They hear about the square of the hypotenuse and immediately imagine they're banging Brooke Burke." She shrugged. "The castoff fantasies congregate nearby. Think of it as a tangible representation of testosterone."

I shook my head. "All right. Setting aside the statistical likelihood that some of the boys in that class are actually homosexual as irrelevant to the conversation, what about the girls? I don't see any bored beefcake waiting outside."

Calliope's grin turned wicked. "The girls typically pay attention. Barbie was a lying bitch."