I stood. “I’m not meddling with anything of yours.” I didn’t think I was. I guess I didn’t really know. I looked at James, and Eleanor looked at him too. By the bus station, a woman was approaching him, arms already outstretched for a hug from several feet away. James’ face was lit with genuine happiness. I didn’t think I’d ever seen him happy before.
Eleanor started to laugh, and she laughed so hard that even the humans, yards away, shivered and glanced around and remarked on the storm that was supposed to arrive later. Eleanor dabbed at her eyes—as if she could cry—and shook her head at me, smiling disbelievingly. “Oh, little leanan sidhe, is that your chosen, there?”
I didn’t like her laugh, and I didn’t like her looking at him.
“What an odd and appropriate choice you’ve made. I nearly killed him a few months ago, and the daoine sidhe brought him back to life for the cloverhand. And now you will finish him off. It’s got a lovely circular feel to it, doesn’t it?”
I didn’t say anything. I just crossed my arms and stood there watching James smile proudly at his mom hugging Roundhead, like he had invented both hugs and his mother.
“Oh.” Eleanor’s hand flew up to her mouth. She leaned toward her human and her delight was hard to bear. “Oh. Do you see that, lovely?” Her consort made a noise of consent. Eleanor said to me, “So that is why you tremble with desire, little whore? Because you have been going without?”
Bullshit I was trembling. I was fine. It hadn’t been that long since Steven. “It’s none of your business.”
“Everything is my business. I care deeply for all my subjects and I hate to think of you wanting for anything.”
“Is that so?” I sneered.
“You need only ask,” Eleanor said. She turned toward James, smiling distantly, like she was remembering. “What’s wrong? He won’t make a bargain with you? I can make him more pliable for you. He was very easy to break, the first time.”
In her head I saw the memory of him, broken and gasping, so clearly that I knew she’d meant for me to. My voice was fierce. “I don’t want to make a bargain with him. My bargains are my own business. You have your business and I have mine. I don’t meddle in yours and you don’t meddle in mine.”
I’d gone way too far, but that image of him had ripped something open inside me. I turned my head, waiting for her wrath.
But she just placed a hand on my shoulder and shook her head, clucking her tongue. “Save your strength. If you mean to last until the day of the dead without making a bargain, you’ll need every bit of it.”
I looked up into her face, and I saw that she was smiling. She was smiling in an awful way that told me she knew exactly how I felt about James and she thought it was interesting. Eleanor, like all the court fey, liked to break interesting things, especially things she’d broken before.
I pushed her fingers off my shoulders, and when I turned to face her, she was gone.
James
In most of my classes at good old TK-A, there were about eighteen students. With the teacher presiding at the front of the classroom, the rest of us had, over the weeks of class time, conveniently arranged ourselves by personality types. Front row: suck-ups and over-achievers like myself. Second row: Friends of suck-ups and over-achievers. And wanna-be friends. And wanna-be suck-ups who were too slow to grab a seat in the front row. Third row: People who were neither suck-ups nor screw-ups (latter parties belonged in the back row). Third row people didn’t interest me. Or anyone else, I think. Too good to be bad and too bad to be good. Back row: as mentioned before, screw-ups, trouble-makers, and those who just didn’t give a damn.
Funny how I really belonged in both the front and the back rows. Didn’t seem like it ought to be possible.
Anyway, our normally cozy class structure was all shot to hell this morning, as Sullivan’s class had been thrown together with Linnet’s dramatic literature section for some nefarious purpose undoubtedly to be revealed later on in the period.
So we’d taken over a larger, brilliantly sunny classroom down the hall that could accommodate the lot of us and suddenly we had to fight for our previous seat/personality assignments. Which is how Paul and I found ourselves in the back row, a place I probably belonged and a place Paul could probably make himself belong by sheer virtue of hanging out with me. What I didn’t expect was to end up sitting next to Dee, who belonged in the back row about as much as I belonged at Thornking-Ash in general. I didn’t have a single class with her and it took me way too long to figure out that she was there because she was in Linnet’s dramatic lit class.
I sat there for several moments, while the autumn breeze blew in the big windows on one side of the room and fluttered the papers on the desks, and thought of things to say to her that were all various stages of funny, informative, or questioning. In the end I just said, “So you really do take classes here.”
Dee did me the favor of laughing, even though it was possibly my lamest line ever, and leaned across her desk to whisper to me, “I’m sorry I was so bawly yesterday.”
On the other side of me, Paul took my hand so that he could write on it. I felt him carefully printing on my skin while I tried to think of something coherent to say to Dee. She was all large-eyed and beautiful as usual but I was missing some of that gnawing urgency to be funny and wanted, which I normally felt when I was around her.
I thought, maybe I can get over her after all. Maybe it doesn’t have to hurt.
“Before we get started, I’m going to need you all to pass forward your composition outline,” Linnet called from the front, sparing me from saying my second lamest line ever. Linnet looked even smaller and more breakable from way back here in the loser-screw-up-don’t-give-a-damn row. “I’m also collecting papers for Mr. Sullivan. I understand you have outlines due for him as well.” There was no sign of Sullivan at the front; usually he was perched on top of the desk by now.
Beside me, Dee flipped open her notebook to pull out her outline and, as she did, I saw the piece of paper underneath it. Some sort of exam. With a big red 42 on it, circled. And F written beside it, in case she’d missed the concept of 42 being a failing grade.
Straight-A front-row beautiful-lost Dee looked over at me as if she knew instinctively that I’d seen the exam and that I’d know right away what that 42 meant to her. Her eyes were wide and frightened and pleading for a second, and I just stared at her, not bothering to hide my shock. Dee laid her hand down on the exam, very carefully, to stop the breeze from catching the edge of the paper. Her fingers covered the grade.