Chapter Eight
I WAS RIGHT about one thing. My door is still propped open with the locking bar sticking out when I slow my jog at my end of the hall. I smack the door open, half expecting Ivan to jump out at me like a poltergeist. Nothing. The room is empty.
In the handful of minutes I’ve spent in the lounge, the sun has set, casting my bedroom in a bluish darkness split only by a streak of bright fluorescent light coming from the cracked-open bathroom door.
I didn’t turn that light on. Even if I did, the motion sensor inside should have turned it off by now—which reminds me: I need to remove that sensor.
I’m eco-friendly in a lot of ways, but I take long showers.
With hair like mine, I kind of have to. That, and showers are the one activity during which no one outside of Norman Bates is likely to interrupt me and I can actually think. Note to self: Disable that sensor.
That’s a tomorrow problem, though. I can hear more of today’s problem rustling around in my en suite, accompanied by the tinny clink of glass bottles and—there! A toilet flush.
I grab the bathroom doorknob and fling it open, realizing a second too late that if Ivan really is in there using my toilet without my permission, it’s possible I’ve just walked in on him with his literal pants down.
I quickly see that’s not the case, but it could have been.
He still jumps with surprise and drops an empty plastic jug on the tile floor, where it bounces and rolls away until it’s stopped by a shopping bag with a huge hole ripped in the bottom.
“Shit, shit shit shit.” Ivan bends over to pick up the handle and drops another plastic bottle in the process.
“Ivan,” I say calmly, but not without menace.
Ivan looks up at me, visibly exhausted, upset, and desperate. Neat.
“Look, Zora,” he says, setting his bottles back upright. “Whatever Emilia told you about me—”
“What?” I interrupt. “Emilia didn’t say anything about you. We weren’t even talking about you.”
“Oh.” He looks puzzled for a moment. “Then, uh. Mind helping me out?” Ivan steps aside to reveal the collection of bottles he has clustered around the foot of my toilet bowl.
All of them are some kind of alcohol. Cheap stuff, less useful as fuel for bad teen decisions and more for disinfecting an action movie protagonist’s bullet wounds when going to the hospital isn’t an option for plot reasons.
“You brought booze into my room?” My mouth drops open in sheer disbelief.
“To get rid of it!” Ivan says. “I was taking it downstairs, but the bag broke, so I panicked and ran in here to flush everything. Now help me trash these bottles or everyone is screwed.”
“No.” I shake my head. “This is a you problem. Get out. Now.”
“It’s an everyone problem,” Ivan argues. “And I can’t. I need to get them out of the building, but there are too many people.”
He has a point. The very nature of this academy means people will do anything to get ahead, and a blurry background image of a competitor holding alcohol is a guaranteed way to get them kicked out. Which makes it even more messed up that he’s brought these bottles to my literal doorstep.
Let me take a moment and pause the game here.
Ivan looks genuinely terrified, and he’s right that getting rid of contraband booze means doing everyone at this party a favor.
There aren’t a ton of bottles, maybe just enough to fit inside a tote bag, but we can’t recycle them in the bins on our floor.
We will have to dump them somewhere outside.
Hold up—who is we? I am not in on this. Ivan can do whatever the hell he wants, but the first step of whatever he does has to be getting this out of my room. He may be doing the right thing, but I am not the one to help him do it. You’d think he’d have learned that by now.
“Lock the door,” I hear myself saying. “I don’t want anyone walking in. Anyone else, I mean.” Wait. Did I not just say I wouldn’t help him? I don’t know who’s in control right now, but it’s not the Zora I know.
“Got it.” Ivan steps around me and leaves the bathroom. I hear him reset the door lock and pull the door closed with a click; then he makes as if to turn my main dorm light on. I stop him.
“Don’t!” I say quickly. I haven’t turned that light on since I arrived for a reason.
“The, uh. The light will show under the door. I don’t want it to look like anyone’s in here,” I say.
It’s only half a lie. The truth is I hate big ceiling lights.
Always have. They’re harsh, too white, and they hurt my eyes.
I’d do everything after 8 p.m. by lamplight if I could, and for the most part I do.
“Okay.” Ivan doesn’t argue. Without the smart retorts, his statements feel somehow unfinished to my ears.
“I have a backpack in the wardrobe.” I gesture toward that side of the room.
“It fits more than you’d think. You grab that and I”—there’s a coarse roll of single-ply paper towels sitting on my bathroom counter; I grab that, as well as two of the bottles—“will use this to muffle the sound of the glass.”
“Thank you,” Ivan says with audible relief. “Here, I’ll start wrapping them.”
His calm irks me. I should be furious right now, but instead I’m handing him secret bottles like we’re 1920s bootleggers running a joint operation.
“I just have one question,” I say as Ivan yanks my empty backpack out of the wardrobe. “Were you born entitled, or did you wait until you got internet famous to walk all over everyone’s boundaries?”
He cringes. “So, Emilia did tell you about me.”
“For the last time, no.” Much as I would have liked her to.
“Wait, so why do you think I’m entitled?”
I could start listing the reasons tonight and still be talking when the sun explodes, but I’ll keep it succinct for now. “You are literally in disbelief that two women weren’t just talking about you.”
“Touché.” Ivan winds the paper towels around a bottle one, two, three, four times before ripping the sheet away from the roll. I go to the bathroom to grab him more bottles. The adrenaline of the situation makes my hands shake, and the bottles clink around when I come back out to hand them over.
“Jeez.” Ivan looks up at me with faux concern. “Is there anything in the universe that chills you out or are you just up here”—he holds his hand a few inches above his head—“like … all the time?”
“I am chill,” I lie for the sake of argument. “I’m so chill it’s nuts.”
“I could maybe believe that,” Ivan says with a scoff. “You were pretty chilly back in January. The phrase ‘ice queen’ comes to mind.”
I think he thinks that’s an insult. I don’t take it that way.
“I’d rather be an ice queen than some kind of …
bottle-juggling party clown. Did you perform enough tricks out there?
Got enough attention to sustain you until your next feed?
Give me that.” Ivan’s wrapping these bottles at the speed of snail, so I grab the roll and start pre-ripping lengths of paper for him.
“Considering ‘ice queen’ is what made you go from total unknown to bonkers unlikeable in one day, I think I’d rather be the clown,” Ivan says. “People like clowns. Name one time a clown was the bad guy.”
“It, both chapters,” I reply, too distracted by the obvious to be anything but 100 percent reactive right now. “American Horror Story. Literally John Wayne Gacy. Killer Klowns from Outer Space. That one really uncomfortable episode of CSI when the dad—”
“Okay, fine!” Ivan chucks a wrapped bottle into my backpack. For a moment I’m afraid it will break; then I see he deliberately picked a plastic one. “That was a bad example. When’s the last time an ice queen got to be the good guy?”
“Frozen.”
“That was one time.”
“… Frozen 2.”
“Oh my god.” Ivan throws his hands up. I’m frustrating him. Good. “Captain Pick-A-Fight. Stand down.”
“I don’t want to fight.” How is this fight my fault when he’s the one who started all of this? From Wizzcon to this afternoon to right now in my dorm room with these contraband bottles. Everything has been his fault.
“All you do is pick fights! We could have been friends at Wizzcon, but no. You had to ruin my chance for no reason.”
Okay, never mind. Imma fight.
“Oh, I’m so sorry about that.” I coat every syllable with sarcasm. “Was I supposed to throw away my strategy in the most important game of my life because some puffed-up eboy batted his eyelashes at me?”
“I did not bat—” Ivan slips the last bottle into my backpack and gives it an experimental shake. No clinking, no clanking. Now what?
“You batted.” He absolutely batted. “Does that usually work for you, by the way? I’ve been racking my brain for where you might get the audacity ever since we met.”
“So, you’ve been thinking about me.” Ivan slides one of the backpack straps over his shoulder, stands up, and tries to get me to meet his eyes.
Not a chance—shit, I did it. Even in the dark, those eyes drink up the multicolored shine of nighttime city lights and reflect it all back green.
On someone else they’d be almost pretty.
“Not … not like that, no.”
“It’s okay,” he continues, smug as hell. “I thought about you too.”
“Well, don’t!” Ugh, he got me to raise my voice a bit too loud.
I lower my tone to a whisper and look through the peephole of my door.
Bad news. The party has outgrown the lounge, and now there are players hanging out in the hall, some leaning against the walls and others sitting in groups on the carpet (gross).
Ivan is going to have a lot of eyes on him when he leaves, but if he times his exit he has a straight shot from here to the elevator.
There are already some people waiting for said elevator to arrive.
“You can’t, like … charm me,” I continue quietly. “I am famously uncharmable.”
“Is that a medical condition?” Ivan whispers back. “Doctor said you’re rizz intolerant?”
“I’m bullshit intolerant. And at Wizzcon, I could smell you a mile away.”