Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Aleo arrives a week later, accompanied by three massive suitcases and a weeping entourage.
I am lying on my bed, a book on magical theory resting open on my face, eyes squeezed shut as I struggle to comprehend what I just read.
The door bursts open with a bang and I flail upright, just in time to make eye contact with Aleo and his entire family.
They’re all tall, blond, and fae, although I notice one of his younger siblings has rounded ears and a shorter stature.
I stare at them. They stare at me.
I am wearing boxers and a t-shirt with a hole in the armpit, mismatched socks on my feet. This does nothing to deter his mother from gawking at me, her mouth open, blue eyes wide.
Have you heard of knocking? I want to demand, relieved that I wasn’t doing anything else, that I don’t have my dick out in front of my new roommate’s entire family. Instead, I plaster a fake smile on my face and say, “Um, hi.”
His mother’s cheeks go pink.
“Oh, hey,” says Aleo.
With an expression caught between horror and something I’d rather not think about, his mom says, “Whoops! Guess you didn’t know we were coming. We’ll give you some privacy.”
They scramble back outside. I root around in my laundry basket for the first pair of pants I can find, which happen to be a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee. Once I’ve hopped into my sneakers, I open the door.
It’s move-in week. I’m not surprised to see Aleo, but I kind of wish I’d had a heads-up.
My side of the room is more than a little bit chaotic.
Worse, my roommate’s entire family witnessed me in my natural habitat, half-dressed and failing to comprehend a simple passage about initiating foresight in the ungifted (I can only imagine the puns Jeremy would make if I read him that sentence).
If I hadn’t been banned from practicing magic in the dorms, maybe I would’ve given it a try. Foresight seems like a gift worth having. But Elarion’s warning echoes in my mind. I’ve seen what he looks like when he was frustrated. I don’t want to know what he’s like when he’s actually angry.
Aleo’s family is nice, if a little bit overbearing.
Both his siblings cram into our bedroom, carefully arranging his things, unpacking his suitcases, stacking his textbooks.
His mom keeps scowling at my side of the room, empty except for scattered books and an overflowing laundry basket.
I’ve shoved the alcohol, protein powder, and all of Mom’s notebooks under the bed.
“Pretty minimalist,” she says. Disapproval colors her voice.
Pretty judgmental for someone who was just leering at me, I want to say, but I don’t. Instead, I shrug. “I didn’t have a whole lot of warning.”
She turns up her dainty nose. “Interesting,” she says, and I blush down to my bones.
By the time Aleo’s family is finally done, and all the teary goodbyes have been given (I go back to interpreting the same passage from earlier in a fruitless attempt to give them some privacy), it’s almost dark.
“So,” says Aleo, grinning wickedly. His hair is mussed and his cheeks are red, but he looks delighted to be here, nonetheless. There’s an air of mischief about him. I’m not sure whether to be intrigued or worried. “Half-fae, huh?”
I sigh, flop back against the headboard. Is this prejudice or polite interest? I can’t tell. “A quarter, actually.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” says Aleo, but I catch the way he looks away from me, like he’s pretending he doesn’t care. I know better. I’ve seen that look before. “You’ve got magic?”
“I guess so.”
“Wow,” says Aleo, plopping down on his bed so hard that the mattress bounces beneath him. “You say that like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, shit,” says Aleo, eyes going wide. “How’d that happen?”
“My mom died in March. I emailed Halea for a copy of her records, and now I’m here. I had no idea she was fae.”
“That’s fucking wild,” says Aleo, brushing blond hair back from his face. “I can’t even imagine that.”
I shrug. “It’s been a weird couple of months.”
“That recent, huh?”
I nod.
“I’m sorry, man.”
We end up in the dining hall. Jane looks disappointed to see me with someone else, but I gesture for her to join us.
Aleo might be my roommate, but Jane is a familiar, trusted face.
We ate lunch and dinner together every day last week.
She’s the reason the knot of loneliness in my chest has finally started to unravel. I’m not abandoning her.
“So,” Aleo says to Jane, cool and conversational. “Did you know?”
Jane looks up from her spinach ravioli, her expression sharp. Her face is classically beautiful in a way that reminds me of a renaissance painting—a nose with a bump near the bridge, arched brows, a small, full mouth. “What do you mean?”
I’m pretty sure I know what she’s referencing, but I haven’t asked yet and she hasn’t volunteered. Aleo, for his part, backpedals immediately. “That you were fae?” he blurts through a mouthful of garlic bread.
“Oh.” Jane lowers her fork. Her expression smooths into something neutral. “Yeah. I’ve known for a long time.”
“Cool,” says Aleo, but he looks a little worried, like he knows he just dodged a bullet. “Hey, uh, that’s great.”
Not for the first time, I wonder what it’s like to be fully fae. To grow up in a household where nobody is pretending to be something they’re not. In my imagination, it’s calm, harmonious. There’s a sense of belonging, of ease. Families gathering without commotion, division.
Then I think of my mom’s ears, and blanch. Maybe it’s not always so simple. I’m not accounting for dozens of other factors. Socioeconomic backgrounds, cultural differences, probably a million other things I’m not even aware of.
“I guess so,” says Jane, but she looks annoyed.
That evening, we meander around campus, sipping from my flask, stopping at all the sights that Aleo has apparently waited his entire life to see.
We find a book bound in dragon skin in the library (I didn’t even know dragons existed until suddenly the book was before me, its bright blue scales indisputable, brilliant in a way that will probably carve itself into my subconscious, spilling into my dreams like the ocean), a statue of a famous necromancer said to haunt the cliffs, a pillar with a secret door where students have hidden notes ranging from romantic to homicidal, a cobblestone of such particular note that Aleo photographs it, and a bench dedicated to Edna the Great, a kitchen worker whose legendary fruit pies ensured that multiple buildings around campus bore her name.
By the end of the tour, I’m so drunk I can barely see straight, hanging onto Jane’s arm for dear life.
Aleo staggers backwards across the main square, landing on one of Edna the Great’s benches.
“We’re one hundred and fifty-two years too late,” he slurs, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.
“We’ll never know the prosperity of our ancestors. ”
I collapse onto the bench beside him. Jane crosses her arms, glares down her nose at us. I make a grabby motion, but she doesn’t join us, and instead looks at me like I’m something sticky she found on the bottom of her shoe. Rude.
“Or they could’ve just, you know, written the recipe down,” she points out.
“They’re magic pies,” Aleo argues, immediately defensive. “No one can replicate her magic.”
I tear up. “That’s kinda beautiful. They can’t even be replicated.
” I think of Mom, all the foods she made that I could probably never recreate.
She never wrote down her recipes, could never explain to me why her lasagna turned out so much better than mine, or why her cookies were so perfectly round where mine were always kinda lumpy no matter what I did.
“God, they’re like people,” I say, and start sobbing.
“His mom just died,” Jane explains, shoving me over to make room. She wraps an arm around me. I hiccup into her shoulder.
“Yeah, he, uh, mentioned that,” says Aleo.
“People are just so good at dying,” I moan. The world around me is blurry, but I don’t mind. It’s kind of pretty that way. I go to take another sip from the flask, but Jane yanks it out of my hand.
“Enough,” she says. The flask disappears into her pocket.
“I wasn’t done with that!” I protest, but she shakes her head.
“You need healthier coping mechanisms.”
“But I was havin’ a good time!”
“Yes, and now you’re crying.”
“You don’t appreciate pie,” I tell her, and sniff. “Or people.”
Beside us, Aleo is laughing. He tries to sneak the flask from her pocket, but she slaps his hand away.
“None for you either,” she tells him. “Honestly. Am I going to have to spend the entire semester babysitting you two?”
Aleo and I exchange glances. “Maybe,” I admit, sheepish.
Jane isn’t exactly wrong.
The semester starts, and everything goes wrong.