Chapter Five
She woke with a start, sure that she would see a nightmare around her. The walls of that demon’s terrible dungeon, she imagined.
All slippery, moss-covered stones scored by the nails of any number of victims. Or maybe the man himself, smiling at her with
a mouth that took up most of whatever face he had.
But somehow, all she actually saw was sunlight, streaming through the curtains. The sheets pulled up around her ears. Her
books stacked neatly on the bedside cabinet. You went to bed like normal and just dreamed you drifted off in the window seat, her mind informed her.
And that seemed reasonable.
Or reasonable enough that she could focus on other things.
Like the fact that it was somehow forty minutes past nine, when her first lecture was, according to her assignment sheet,
at ten. It was at ten, and she was still half asleep and in her nightdress. So she flung herself through peeing and washing
and dressing in a mad scramble, then bolted out the door. Down the spiral steps, into the low gray sunlight beyond, up to
the main building, and then left and left again.
She got there with seconds to spare.
Though it didn’t look it once she was inside the dim and dusty-looking hall.
Fifty sets of eyes all swiveled to her, like she had turned up in the middle of a lecture by the not actually present professor.
And they stayed on her, as she made her slow, red-faced way up the steps that bisected the rows of seats.
She saw someone lean and whisper something to her glamorous-looking friend.
Another person laughed, loudly enough that others joined in.
But she couldn’t hurry and sit down.
There weren’t any seats left. Not even next to Anaya, who was crammed between two massive brickheaded rugby playing–looking
lads, one of whom she was clearly fuming at. Mina could even see why—he’d obviously just sat on the bag she’d tried to save
a seat with. Anaya tried to give him a shove, and there was a hint of the yellow backpack Mina had seen on her friend the
day before.
She had to gesture at Anaya not to do anything silly on her behalf, like get beaten up by someone with ears like fists. Then
she put on an amused, brave sort of face to really drive the reassurance home. Everything is fine, she told herself.
Even though her situation was actually pretty dire. Every single row seemed full—until she got to the final one, and glimpsed
a space with something like relief, and took a step toward it. Then the people obscuring it sat down, and she saw who she
would be sitting beside if she took it.
The bane of her existence.
Just slouched there, bold as brass and so casual it was infuriating. His hair looked hardly brushed. The sweater he was wearing
had a hole in it. He had gum in his mouth and seemed barely bothered about chewing it. And she could already tell that he
had no means to take notes.
No bag, no pad in front of him, no pen in his hand.
Much to her irritation. She had spent a good amount of the stipend she had been awarded on the twelve spares in her satchel.
There was so much paper and so many notebooks in there that her shoulder was aching already from carrying them all.
And here he was with absolutely nothing.
Like he wanted to make it absolutely clear how little he needed this, how above it he was.
I should be in a class far ahead of this, his entire attitude said. Then he spotted her, and it said something more. I should be far ahead of you, it seemed like. In fact, for just a second, she thought he was going to shift a bag or a coat and dump it into that spare
seat. As if he was saving it for someone better and cooler and more polished—even though of course he couldn’t possibly be.
Everyone was here already. If he did it, he would be doing it just to spite her.
Though was it really spite if you kind of hoped he would?
As if I want to be close to you, she thought, so heatedly it seemed like something he should feel. But if he did, he gave no sign of it. He just stared at
her, like he had in Grand Central Station, like he had in the hall of past headmasters, like he had in the maze. A little
sullen, a little amused, a lot like a challenge.
Go on, I dare you, girl who doesn’t belong, it looked like to her.
So she answered in her head: I will, bastard who wants to break all my dreams. Then she stumbled and fumbled and fought her way past his probable friends, and shoved herself into the seat. Breathless
and even messier than she had been when she started this day. But she had done it.
And of course, she regretted it instantly.
Sitting down that fast and frenziedly meant she hadn’t thought about where any of her limbs were going.
So now her hand was on the armrest of her seat, quite by chance.
And his hand was in the same position, on his armrest. And both were far too close together.
She could have clenched her fist and grazed the cuff of his sweater.
Though it wasn’t the cuff she was concerned about.
It was how far up he had shoved it. How much forearm he had exposed, and how thick that forearm looked, and oh, the amount
of hair all over it. She didn’t even have to see it. She could actually feel it whenever she so much as took a breath. The shift
of her body stirred her arm, and there it was.
The brush of that fur against her own frighteningly bare skin.
None of which she could cover up. She couldn’t abruptly tug her sleeves that far down—he would notice she was doing it. She
just had to pretend nothing at all was happening. That none of this bothered her. Even as she felt each individual hair almost
bristle against the back of her hand.
It made her think of spider legs, of things scurrying over her.
She ached to rub wherever he was almost touching.
And that wasn’t even the only terrible thing about sitting so close to him. No, god, no—there was also that winter air scent.
The one that was now so strong it seemed to fill her body every time she took a breath. She could almost taste it on her tongue,
like melted ice, like frost on glass. Strange sounding, she knew, but at the same time it made some kind of sense.
Because for some reason, he seemed to have almost no body heat at all.
He shifted, and instead of getting a bloom of warmth from him, she got a wave of cold. Like she was sitting next to the opposite
of molten lava—freezing instead of fiery, yet somehow no less searing for it. It branded the side of her face, the back of
her hand, her arm. It made her want to move away even more than the brush of his hair had.
But before she could, she felt him shift.
He leaned toward her, so close it made her go rigid.
“Happy now, about doing this to me?” he asked, so close to her ear and so amused sounding she could tell what it meant. He
knew she was uncomfortable. He knew this was hell for her. And now he wanted to make sure she suffered for her perceived crimes.
Even though the crimes weren’t hers at all.
They were his, and the sheer injustice of that made her spit fire before she could stop herself. “You did this to yourself.
If you hadn’t been so eager to punt me from this place, you’d be in whatever snooty advanced classes you wanted to be now.
Instead of being stuck here with someone you loathe in a lecture you’ve probably been through before,” she hissed under her
breath. Though it was loud enough that the guy on the other side of her shifted nervously. And a girl in front almost looked
back.
At which point she realized:
None of these people were his friends. He had no friends in a basic class like this. Everybody here was afraid of him to almost
as great a degree as she was. Greater, really, because none of them were squabbling with him. It was just her, signing her
own death warrant.
“I was doing you a favor, sending you back to the beginning,” he said, even more heatedly than he had those first words. Yet
somehow, she still didn’t stop. She kept her face forward, but she answered him in kind.
“Is that what you tell yourself to help you sleep at night?”
“No, I count how many ways I could ruin you, and that sends me straight off.”
“Well, this conversation is going to have you out like a light, then.”
“If this cuts you that deep, god knows how you’re going to cope here.”
“I wouldn’t have to just cope if people like you would let people like me be.”
“What exactly do you mean, ‘people like me’? Who is the me in this scenario?”
“People who look wrong and act wrong. People who don’t know the proper way to dress or the right way to talk or the exact
etiquette needed to get anywhere in life. People who have nothing,” she said, so frustrated and furious that the last word
came out far too breathless, far too scorched by emotion.
It made her seem vulnerable, she could tell, and vulnerability was the last thing she wanted to reveal to him. It was like
baring her throat for a thing with fangs. He was probably going to say something so vicious now that she’d never recover.
Yet somehow, instead, silence followed.
A long silence of the sort that built and built until she had to break it. She had to see what was happening. Her head was
too full of all the terrible things he could have been doing to not. She imagined a fireball aimed at her head, and turned
jerkily, breath caught in her throat, heart hammering.
But there was nothing.
Just him staring at her with this strange, almost flummoxed expression on his face. As if she’d said something so wounding
he couldn’t quite recover. He just had to sit there, bleeding, instead of firing back. Even though she knew that couldn’t
be the case. It wasn’t possible to stab someone with their own scorn.
And even if it was, she didn’t have the skills or the weapons to do it.