Chapter 21 Orion
Orion
“Ms. Bennett, Mr. Mercer, so glad you could join us,” Professor Callister intoned from the whiteboard as Harper took her seat in the front and I took my spot next to Tessa in the back.
The pretty actress gave me a friendly smile, but I had nothing in the tank to give back.
If Callister played his read-aloud game, I was going to lose my bloody mind.
“I was informing the class that today is the last day for review before your Mesopotamia essays are due on Friday,” he said.
“You’ll all do well to take extensive notes on today’s lecture to hone your facts.
Fair warning: I’ll be running your papers through an AI-detection system.
I’ll know if you’ve gone outside the classroom for assistance. ”
The students pulled out their iPads for notetaking. I went to do the same and found that I’d left all of my electronic helpers back at the dorms. Because of course I did.
Shit, fuck, bollocks.
I raised my hand. “Professor Callister, I left my iPad back at Atlas Hall. Might I run and grab it? I’ll only be gone a minute.”
“No, you may not,” he said. “You can take notes like we did back in the ancient times: with a pen and paper.”
He turned back to his lecture, and I slunk deeper into my seat. Harper glanced over her shoulder, concern in her eyes. I quickly averted mine. Why should she be concerned? There was nothing obviously wrong with me, except my handwriting was absolute shit.
“Callister’s an ass,” Tessa whispered, and passed me a few sheets of notebook paper and a pen.
“Thanks, love,” I muttered. I needed to take notes. My term paper, as it currently stood, was absolute shit too, and I was too wrung out to try to memorize Callister’s lecture. But writing by hand—never mind my penmanship—wasn’t my brain’s favorite thing to do.
Because it’s hard to focus, that’s all. It takes a lot of concentration. I’m a auditory spatial learner, like Wolfe said.
I hunched over, making a protective barrier with my left arm, and put the pen to paper.
I tried to follow along to the lecture, my pen scratching away the best I could, but the words came out looking like jagged peaks in a needle-sharp mountain range.
Getting them down at all was a supreme effort in forcing communication between brain and hand.
Within minutes, I was too far behind and gave up.
Out of desperation, I sketched instead. I drew the images that Callister’s words created in my mind: a city-state called Sumer nestled between two rivers that had pioneered most of humanity’s biggest breakthroughs, including the wheel, the plow, irrigation, and—irony of ironies—the written word.
When the bell finally rang, I was bloody beat. Exhausted in a way I never felt after a regatta race. I had a strange yearning to talk to Ezra Wolfe but not in his class.
Which I had next.
With Harper.
I had to get out. Get away from fucking classrooms. I hastily gathered my stuff and slipped out the door, to the gym.
There, I changed into workout clothes in the locker room and found a bunch of my crewmates working out on the ergs and lifting weights.
In the center of the huge gym, the men’s gymnastics team was practicing on the rings, the floor, and Gideon Foster was doing his thing on the horizontal bar, defying gravity with amazing spins and flips.
I joined my mates at the weights just in time to find Xander confronting Tucker about how he’d kicked Emery out of his truck the night of the storm.
“You left her,” Xander was saying, getting right up in Tucker’s face but remaining cool as hell. “You fucking left her in the pouring rain.”
Tucker had the decency to look embarrassed for half a second, then glanced to Rhett Calloway for back up. I moved to do the same for Xander.
“Back off, Ford, if you know what’s good for you.”
Tucker started to turn away, but it was a ruse. He came back with a swing and Xander was ready. He ducked Tucker’s fist and slammed his left elbow into the bigger guy’s nose.
Holy shit, I thought, and did my best not to snicker.
Tucker staggered back, blood leaking from between his fingers, his eyes wide. “I think you broke my fucking nose.”
Xander crossed his arms. “I didn’t want a physical confrontation, but there needs to be a reckoning.”
“A what?” Tucker spat a wad of blood on the floor. “I was drunk that night. I don’t remember shit.”
“I’ll jog your memory,” Xander said, still cold as ice in his boxy black glasses. “There was a torrential downpour, and you left her stranded on a deserted road.”
Tucker scoffed. “So what? You’re here to defend her honor?”
“Yes.”
“He’s challenging you to a duel,” Rhett sneered. “Did you see Hamilton one too many times?”
“Knock it off, Rhett,” I said, my hands clenching into fists, remembering it was Rhett who had told Brent to fuck with Harper’s car. I don’t know why it had taken me so long to see it, but Calloway was bad news. I hesitated to call anyone evil, but…
If the pitchfork fits…
Tucker glowered at Xander. “Pretty fucking bold maneuver, Ford. You know I could kick your ass right now.”
“Possibly, given our height and weight differentials, and your amplified propensity for violence,” Xander replied. “Regardless, I can’t, in good conscience, remain teammates with someone of such low character.”
“Low character.” Rhett chuckled. “Who does this guy think he is?”
“Shut it, Calloway,” I said, and Rhett swiveled his black-eyed gaze to me. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but the gym suddenly seemed ten degrees colder.
“It’s cool, Rhett,” Tucker said, holding his gym towel to his nose. “Can we have a minute?”
I leaned in to Xander. “I’ve got your back,” I said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and stepped aside, arms crossed.
Xander and Tucker moved a few steps away to have it out. I kept one eye on them, the other on Rhett. He cocked his head at me, eyes narrowed, watching me with a malicious kind of curiosity.
“Got something to say, Calloway?”
“I was about to ask the same of you, Mercer,” Rhett said, his tone overly friendly. Sinisterly casual. “You’ve been different this year. I mean, every year, you’ve been the Patron Saint of the Benders, but I always assumed it was part of your act.”
“My act?” I scoffed, but my hands on my arms tightened. “What the hell are you on about?”
“Your congeniality act. Your Mr. Everybody’s Friend act,” Rhett said, taking a step closer to me. “But you want to know what I think?”
“Can’t wait.”
“I think you’re a bloody impostor with a secret,” he said in a mock British accent. “I think you’ve got the hots for that pretty little Bender with the shitty car. But that’s not all. Oh, no. I think there’s something else you haven’t been sharing with the class.”
“Oh yeah? And what might that be?” I asked, striving to keep my tone light. Congenial.
Rhett raised his narrow shoulders. “I have a secret of my own. I’m a hoarder. I hoard observations and tuck them away until I feel they might be useful. And I’ve made some observations about you over the last three years and three months.”
A muscle ticked in my jaw, but I said nothing.
Rhett smiled his mirthless smile. The one that didn’t touch his dark eyes in the slightest.
“I think, in a family of super smart people—geniuses even, like your brother—you’re the stupid one.
The intellectual runt of the litter. And when I say stupid, I mean stupid as in, can barely read.
And you’ve been trying your damnedest to cover it up by being the guy who makes everyone laugh so that no one finds out you’re actually kind of a moron. ”
I couldn’t move. Could hardly breathe. My hands ached, clenched tight into fists.
A red haze descended, and all I could see were Rhett’s black eyes in his narrow, pale face.
A weasel face. All I could hear was my own blood thrashing in my ears.
All I could think about was putting my fist through that weasel face until the constant, shameful feeling of not being good enough—of being broken and defective, an embarrassment to my family—went away.
I’d beat that knowing smile off Rhett’s mouth until it didn’t work, and he couldn’t tell anyone.
Until my fingers broke, and I couldn’t play piano. And then I’d have nothing…
Then Rhett broke the spell with a chuck on my shoulder and a laugh. “But hey, it’s all good. The crew has never been better. We’ll sweep the regattas, and it doesn’t take a high IQ to row two seat, am I right?”
My arms dropped to my sides, and I pulled my right hand back, fist ready to fly straight into his jaw, when a bone-chilling howl echoed through the gym.
For a split second, I thought it had come from me.
Then everyone in the weight room was running past me.
Moving like a zombie, I followed Tucker and Xander and that fucker Rhett to the gymnasts.
A crowd had gathered around the mat beneath the horizontal bar where someone was moaning and making strange, hiccuping noises of pure agony. Declan McConnell, our rings specialist, ran for a trashcan and heaved.
“Gideon,” Tucker murmured. He shoved his way through the crowd then stopped, his face going pale. “Jesus fucking Christ, someone call an ambulance!”
My red-hazed vision cleared, and I sucked in a breath.
Gideon Foster was on the mat, sweat-soaked and pale as a ghost. He shivered and trembled, little cries slipping from between his clenched teeth.
He sat ramrod straight, staring in horror at his own right leg that was bent in a way no human knee was meant to bend.
It stuck out from his body in a hideous, ninety-degree angle, like a broken straw.
My rage morphed into shocked anguish, tinged with no small amount of nausea. Whispers flew all around me that he’d slipped during the dismount, or that there’d been water on the mat. Or he’d just plain landed wrong.
Landed wrong. Yeah, you could say that.