26. Back then
Back then
Helena was both the youngest Person in the class and the smartest, a combination that made her an easy and immediate target for bullying. Even at a school for mostly nerds, someone still had to be the nerdiest.
When Bertram noticed People teasing Helena, he would glower at them, and they would stop.
A lot of the time, though, she wasn’t being made fun of directly. Not in a way he could point to or quote and say, “There. That’s what you’re doing to her. Now stop.”
It was just sort of the way People looked at her.
The smirks and glances they gave one another when Helena answered a question in class.
The way they spoke to her—or didn’t. There was no way Bertram knew to fix that.
You couldn’t just go around telling People to talk to the weird kid more.
That wouldn’t guarantee that they would speak to her kindly.
If you forced them to invite her, it didn’t mean they would let her have fun at the party.
Bertram, for his part, did not care all that much for parties one way or the other.
He had a multitude of hobbies he enjoyed and played too many sports to have enough free time to spend it getting fucked up on a consistent basis.
He would party with his teammates now and again, but when it came to large social gatherings outside his friend group, it was a rare occasion that he made an appearance.
So, when Helena begged and begged him to come with her to a house party at a senior goblin’s place, Bertram was surprised.
Helena wasn’t usually invited to these things, but he was happy for her that she got to be included.
If she needed him to come along to make her feel comfortable, then of course he would.
He wanted Helena to have friends. He wanted Helena to be happy.
If he could help make Helena happy, of course he would do it.
“Bertram!” Helena beamed when she met him at the subway. “I’m so glad you’re coming! This is my friend, Layla!”
“He knows me,” Layla said, quickly. “I’m on the cheer squad.”
Bertram smiled and said he did know Layla, and it was good to see her.
He really didn’t know Layla. He would’ve been hard-pressed to remember her name, but her face did look vaguely familiar. She was a flower fae, and excruciatingly beautiful to look at.
Maybe that’s why Bertram had never noticed her or introduced himself—he always assumed that girls that kind of pretty would want nothing to do with him.
But as they rode the subway to the goblin’s house, Bertram got the feeling that Layla did want something to do with him, possibly wanted a lot to do with him.
And only him.
Layla had many, many questions for Bertram, and almost none for Helena.
It made Bertram’s heart ache to see how excited Helena got every time she thought of something to interject into the conversation, and how the light in her eyes dimmed every time Layla gave a dismissive one-word answer and returned to talking to Bertram.
Bertram wondered if Helena was the one who really wanted Bertram at the party, or if Bertram were the reason Helena was invited to the party at all. Was that why she had begged him so desperately? Was her invitation contingent on his presence?
He didn’t want to ask her, didn’t want to embarrass her in front of this older, cooler girl.
So, Bertram went out of his way to make sure that he was speaking to Helena just as much as he was speaking to Layla and tried as hard as he could to get the two girls to speak to each other.
The goblin’s parents were away on a button hunt deep in the mountains of a pocket world that weekend, and the cozy abode had Titania Tech students practically pouring out of it. They engaged in all the usual shenanigans that were popular amongst students at that time.
There was the stupidest trend—Bertram was unsure if it had come from the human world or the being world, but either way it had infiltrated pretty much all words—in which one tried to hand someone a bottle of blue raspberry lemonade YETI Avalanche without them noticing what it was.
The Person who received the bottle had to immediately drop to one knee and chug the whole thing.
It was called being “YETIed,” and the kids of Titania Tech found it endlessly entertaining to prank one another in this fashion.
Bertram, at seventeen, downed three YETIs over the course of the party, two of which had been foisted on him in the prank fashion, but he remained unaffected. His orcish heritage gave him an unnaturally strong constitution.
Helena, newly sixteen, had a few intermittent sips of Bertram’s, and nothing more.
Bertram had offered it to her because he knew she wouldn’t drink a full bottle of her own—shouldn’t drink a full bottle on her own, would be knocked thoroughly on her ass by it—but she clearly felt uncomfortable not drinking anything.
Bertram thought this was a compromise that should protect Helena’s social capital without getting her too drunk.
He was wrong.
What he had actually done was put a target on her back.
Apparently even the act of sharing a drink was far too intimate for the other girls to tolerate.
Layla’s glaring at Helena only increased as Bertram passed the bottle of YETI back and forth with her.
Marianne was glaring too—she was a human girl, arguably even more stunning than Layla.
She wasn’t a cheerleader, but Bertram remembered her as an extraordinary violinist at a recent school concert.
He also thought she was a friend of Helena’s, though she didn’t look all that friendly at the moment.
At the beginning of the night, Marianne and Layla asked Bertram outright which of them he thought was prettier, a question which he dodged by taking another sip of his drink. He couldn’t imagine why they would care about his answer, anyway.
The question was asked again, later on, now in a more drunk and insistent fashion, with threats of what would happen if Bertram refused to answer.
Still, Bertram refused to answer.
It took Bertram longer than it should have to realize that Layla’s and Marianne’s subtle jabs at each other and at Helena were attempts to vie for Bertram’s attention. He didn’t like it; he didn’t like any of it.
He wanted to take Helena and go home before she realized what was going on.
At the moment, it seemed like she was too excited to have been invited somewhere to fully absorb the dynamic at play. He didn’t want her to. He wanted her gone and protected from how shitty teenagers could be.
But she looked like she was enjoying herself, and she had been so thrilled just to be invited. Bertram didn’t want to take that away from her, didn’t want to spoil the illusion if Helena was happy.
But where Layla and Marianne had been rivals in pursuing Bertram, now they were rivals in mocking Helena.
They were subtle jabs—that it was impressive that Helena was so young but still made the best grades in class; they would have almost forgotten how young she was if she didn’t still have all her baby fat.
But not to worry, they were sure her breasts would come in soon.
When Bertram shot Layla a warning look she stared innocently back at him and said, “What? I was being encouraging!”
“She really was,” Helena said at once, though she was blushing. “It was—it was a compliment.”
“Exactly,” Layla said, and throughout the night gave her many more such compliments. Bertram could see it chip away at Helena, little by little.
Marianne was not quite so overt in her cruelty, but she laughed at all of Layla’s jokes and didn’t stand up for Helena. Which was odd—again, Bertram had remembered that Marianne was Helena’s friend. Unless something had happened between the two of them. Bertram couldn’t remember.
As the night progressed into technically early morning, they all somehow ended up playing truth or dare. They were a little too old for it, in Bertram’s opinion, but it seemed like it was mostly an excuse for everyone to get to kiss everyone else with no actual real-world consequences.
When it was Marianne’s turn to ask Bertram truth or dare, he answered “dare” —knowing that if he picked “truth” she would undoubtedly ask him who was prettier, her or Layla.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise when Marianne’s dare was to kiss the prettiest girl at Titania Tech, with a look in her eye that said she better be kissed, while Layla smiled broadly in an inviting way to suggest that she ought to be kissed.
What was a surprise to both of them—and to Bertram as well—was that with no hesitation, he turned immediately to his right and kissed Helena.
“Well, that’s a fucking joke,” Marianne said, as Helena turned bright red and hid her face in her sweater.
“No, what’s a joke is a bunch of nearly grown People playing kid games and acting like squabbling toddlers the entire time.” Bertram took Helena by the arm and brought her to her feet. “Come on, Hel. Let’s go home.”
Bertram and Helena walked to the subway together and waited in silence for the train to arrive. They sat beside each other but did not make eye contact.
“Do you really think that I’m the prettiest girl at Titania Tech?” Helena asked, a mix of terror and hope in her voice.
“I don’t not think you’re the prettiest girl at Titania Tech,” Bertram said.
“That’s not an answer,” Helena grumbled.
“I don’t—I don’t think about women like that,” he said, diplomatically, or so he thought.
In the light of adulthood, he realized that his answer probably hadn’t come across as very diplomatic at all.
But at the time, it felt strange to tell Helena she was beautiful in the context of ranking girls against one another, even though he did think Helena was beautiful.
“Then why did you kiss me?” Helena asked.
“I don’t know,” Bertram said. “I guess I wanted to teach those girls a lesson. That being mean doesn’t get them anywhere. And that they’re not as great as they think they are. And they can’t treat People that way.”
“So, it had more to do with them than it did with me,” Helena said.
“Yeah, I guess,” said Bertram, peacefully unaware that he had walked directly into a trap.
“Right. Cool,” said Helena.
At the time, Bertram thought she was pissed that he felt the need to rescue her or pissed that she was being made fun of in the first place or some combination of both.
It was at least a year before he realized that she was pissed because she had wanted him to kiss her because he genuinely thought she was the prettiest girl at Titania Tech, and because he wanted to kiss her.