Chapter 10 In Which I Am Forbidden from Eating Toast
In Which I Am Forbidden from Eating Toast
One night, Sahir knocked on my door still in his suit, his laptop under his arm. When I called, “Who is it?” he opened the door and entered.
“Hi, Sahir,” I said, leaning back in the desk chair. “How are you?”
Sahir hated human greetings more than anyone else in the class, probably because he was the only one who actually had to use them regularly.
He looked around, frowning. “Are you working?”
I gestured to my computer screen, where an Excel model was running through twenty-four data tables. “Of course.”
“I thought I might work here, with you.”
I looked around my room for a good spot. Bed, desk, yards of bare wall. I waved vaguely into the air. “Yes, sure. Sit anywhere.”
He went to the unmade bed and stared down at it like a drill sergeant preparing to ream out a recruit.
But he didn’t say anything, just grabbed a corner of the quilt and pulled the coverlet up the bed.
Then he slid out of his suit jacket, revealing a white button-up shirt, and hung it on a hook by the night table.
I did not recall the existence of this hook.
When he reached out, his button-up strained at the shoulders but didn’t tear, thus failing to perform a public service.
I propped my elbow up on the desk and watched him settle onto the bed, his long legs out in front of him and his back against my pillow. I thought about asking him to add a throw pillow into the mix, so his shirt wasn’t on my sheets.
He looked up and caught my eye. “Do you want to sit with me?”
What, on the bed? My mouth went dry, and then watered, and then I choked on my own saliva and coughed unattractively. Sahir sat impassively through this completely wordless and unutterably mortifying ordeal.
“Sure,” I said, once I was reasonably sure I wasn’t choking anymore. I unplugged my laptop from the docking station and joined him on the bed. We sat side by side, my shoulder against his upper arm. He smelled comfortingly like cinnamon, warm and earthy.
I felt myself melting into his side, my piano-wire-tense muscles relaxing as the adrenaline faded from my bloodstream. I waited for him to inch away, but Sahir had already proven himself very touchy. He put his arm around me and pulled me against him, his eyes still on his work.
I glanced at his screen to see one of the bank’s newest climate change campaigns, centered on the reuse of the provided single-use plastic utensils stocked on every floor.
It was called Pla-STICK It in a Drawer, and I couldn’t decide if the responsible copywriter should be fired or promoted.
I ran my thumb along the gold ring on my index finger, and then twisted the ring from one hand to the other.
“Has that campaign had any impact on our office’s waste?” I asked, jerking my chin at his lap.
He rubbed his fingertips along my elbow, dragged the rough fabric of my shirt across my forearm in a soothing circle. “None whatsoever.”
I leaned my head against his shoulder, relieved to have some kind of contact with another person. The hours passed, the two of us tapping away at our keyboards, and by the end of the night I’d become inured to his presence on my bed.
After that, he came and worked next to me most nights. We sat in silence and typed on our computers. Sometimes I felt him looking over my shoulder at my email exchanges.
Usually I fell asleep next to him before he left, sliding down the pillows with my laptop still on my lap. Doctor Kitten always lay between us, the world’s hairiest chaperone.
Another week passed this way.
The Gray Knight sat on the edge of the bed, staring at me.
“You are someone special,” she said, “and I cannot stop thinking about you.”
She changed, lengthening and darkening, and was the Princeling. “Your mortal mind cannot comprehend my plans,” he told me. “And there is no reason to try. You serve me best here. Isn’t that what you always wanted?” He smirked, cruel and so, so beautiful. “To serve your faerie lord?”
His shoulders hunched and he became the Crone. “A strand of yarn does not know it is part of a cloak,” she said, in a voice like my father’s.
I woke up and grabbed my phone from the pillow beside me. I’d dialed my dad before I even checked the time, but it didn’t matter. He was on his way to work, of course.
“Miri?” he asked. I heard the rush of air and the whir of his tires on the cement. He was on the highway.
“Dad?” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah. Are you okay? Your mom’s getting worried.”
I pictured him sitting in his car, his left arm on the window and his right on his thigh, hands loose around the wheel.
There was a loud noise from the hallway.
“I’m fine, Dad.” I stood up and went to the door. “I’ve just been busy with work stuff.” A technically true statement.
“And with your pedagogical responsibilities?” Dad sounded amused.
Of my parents, my dad was the less concerned about my relocation. He found the Princeling entertaining as a concept, and he seemed unshakably certain of my ability to finagle a way out of Faerie in time for the holidays in three months.
Another noise from the other side of the door, like a ball bouncing down the corridor. I sighed, opened the door, and stuck my head out into the hallway.
“Mostly busy with my regularly scheduled poisonings, actually.” I swung my head around, but I saw no potential source of noise. “I was sick again last night, and I’m pretty sure it’s the food.” This fact hadn’t impacted my staying up until two a.m.
One last glance around the hall yielded no evidence of a perpetrator. Maybe Schubert was getting some rounds in. I closed the door and went back to bed.
“You probably just aren’t used to magical food,” my dad said dismissively. My dad was a surgeon and consequently believed that if he couldn’t operate on it, it wasn’t a problem.
“Maybe… but I don’t really want to talk about it. How’s stuff at home?”
“Same old,” my dad said, and didn’t elaborate.
“Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine.”
I wondered what he wasn’t telling me—probably that she was waking him up every two hours to propose some new harebrained scheme to spring me from Faerie. Probably that they were falling apart at home, worried and terrified.
My dad cleared his throat. “How’s my grandcat?” he asked.
“Delightful,” I said. “And chaotic. He’s made friends with a few birds.”
Doctor Kitten had quickly become a favorite of the birds, who liked to sit on the other side of the window and taunt him until he stood up on his hind legs and scrabbled uselessly against the magic barrier.
“We miss you,” my dad said. He sounded uncertain.
I stared across the room, at the waterfall shower. “I miss you, too,” I said. “I have to go. I love you, Dad.”
“Love you, too,” he said. I hung up and got out of bed, crouching over the suitcase still on the floor where I’d left it.
It seemed that nobody intended to give me a closet or any sort of dresser, so I’d be living out of my suitcase for the rest of my life.
I pulled out a pair of jeans, stared at them, and threw them over my shoulder.
Why did I need to look nice? It didn’t matter.
I grabbed black sweatpants covered in white cat hair and pulled them on.
When I used the toilet, I looked at the shower but didn’t get in. And at the sink, I glanced at the makeup bag but didn’t open it. I did take Doctor Kitten’s water bowl, empty it out, and refill it. The food stayed full no matter how much he ate. I kicked the litter box, but there were no clumps.
There never were. It must have been faerie magic, because I’d started watching to make sure he went, and he definitely went.
“Breakfast?” I asked Doctor Kitten, who’d sat down in the warm spot I left on the bed. He looked up from his grooming. “Lene will be there,” I added.
He raised a cat eyebrow. “Fine,” I said. “You stay here.”
I knocked on Lene’s door, and she opened it immediately. “Breakfast?” I asked, feeling a little shy.
“Of course!” she said, stepping into the hallway. She wore a jumpsuit, a loose, sleeveless blue thing that didn’t restrict her movements. Her tail stuck out a hole at the back. “I knew you would retrieve me, so I waited.”
“You waited to eat breakfast with me?” I asked, touched.
“Yes,” she said. “I am good at waiting.” She stopped in front of the dining hall doors. I pushed one open, and she stepped through in front of me.
I’d decided that this was an opportune time to revisit my questions about different types of faeries.
“So if Gaheris is a fire faerie, and Sahir is a dryad,” I started, but she giggled.
“Sahir is not a dryad,” she said. “Oh, that is so funny. You should call him a dryad. He’s a woodland Fae.” We went to the buffet line. I scanned the three people working it—Milo was on the end.
“Ah, I’m sorry,” I said to Lene. “Is it rude to ask people what type of faerie they are?”
“Well, usually we can tell,” she said. “So I have never thought about it. But you can ask me.” She held her tray out and the first faerie—the one with snake scales on her face—put a bowl of hot cereal onto it.
I did the same. The faerie gave me a single piece of buttered toast.
“Okay,” I said, choosing to ignore this—she gave me something boring and bland whenever she thought she could get away with it. And anyway, I loved toast. “What type of faerie are you?”
“Well, some call us therianthropes, but we are just faeries with a particular affiliation for a type of animal. We tend to become more like them as we age.” The second faerie served us both, some type of quiche thing. Milo put a bowl of fruit on Lene’s tray. I stopped in front of him.
“Good morning, Milo,” I said.
“Good morning, Miri.” He put a bowl on my tray as well: Today the fruit salad was composed largely of slightly spiky fruits that looked like rambutans but had no peel. I didn’t enjoy them at all; the fibrous exterior caught in my throat.