Only Liu didn’t go red. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “I kissed Yuyan last night instead.”
We obviously immediately set up a howl for more details, and she was giggling and she did turn red again, admitting that there had been somewhat less deadly serious practicing of music going on in the evenings in her room than perhaps we might have thought. “Also excuse you,” Aadhya said. “What was up with letting us hassle you about Zixuan all this time! Or were you trying to decide?”
She only meant it in fun, but Liu swallowed, visibly, and then she said, a bit wavering, “It would…it would have been smart of me.”
We both understood right away, and it stopped the teasing cold: she meant, she had been trying to decide, but not because she’d wanted to do something stupid; she hadn’t wanted to sneak over to Zixuan’s room for one last night, hadn’t wanted to rip his shirt into shreds in the middle of the gym pavilion with a mass of amphisbaena romantically hissing and thrashing down at the base of the steps. She’d had that insidious whispering in her ear, the calculations that never stopped running inside our heads: it would be smart—to hook a cute, talented, enclaver boy from Shanghai, when he let it be known he was there to be hooked.
Just like it had been smart to bring in a dozen mice, small helpless lives you could hold in the cup of your hand, and kill them instead, one at a time, so you could suck enough mana out of them to keep yourself alive.
There were a few tears welling up over her lashes and dripping off. She put the heels of her hands to her eyes and pressed to stop them. She said rawly, “I wanted to want…the right things. The things I was supposed to want. But I don’t. Even the ones that are good.” She gave a small choked sniffle. “And Zixuan is. He’s nice, and cute, and I like him, and it would make it okay that I didn’t do what they wanted. I didn’t have mana to give to Zheng and Min, but I did this instead, this other right thing. And Ma would be so happy. I’d be her smart girl. I’d be her smart girl again. Like when I said I would do it to the mice, for me and Zheng and Min.”
I hadn’t realized before, but it made perfect sense: that was why the cleansing had worked so well on her. Because she’d said yes, not so much for her own sake, but for the boys, and so she’d taken almost no malia from the mice, our first three years. Just barely enough to survive on.
“And that’s what Zixuan would like, too,” she said. “A smart girl who wants the right things. He wants the right things himself. He wanted to meet my parents and help build the enclave. He’s excited about it. Dominus Li is his great-uncle. He thinks he can persuade him to help us. And I want to help my family, I want to take care of them, but…I can’t be that girl. I can’t be the smart girl. I can only be me.”
Aadhya reached out to her, and I did, too; we put our hands on her, and Liu reached out her own slightly damp hands and gripped ours, one in each, tight. “We’re going home tomorrow,” she said, and kept hold of us determinedly: we’d both flinched. We hadn’t broken that rule. You didn’t say out loud, I’m going to graduate. But Liu held on and said it again. “We’re going home tomorrow. I’m going home. And my mother is going to be so happy, and for a long time, she won’t care about anything, except that I’m back. But then she’s going to want me to want the right things again. The things that the family think are the right things.” She stopped, and took a deep breath and let it out. “But I’m not going to. I’m going to want the things I want, and help them the way I can help them. And those are going to be the right things, too.”
I reached out to Aadhya, and the three of us made a circle together: not anything formal, but still a circle, still the three of us together, holding each other up. Liu squeezed our hands again, smiling at us, her eyes bright but not dripping tears anymore, and we smiled back.
We couldn’t keep sitting there smiling like muppets the whole night, so eventually…I went back to my room—without any side trips; I did manage to resist temptation—only to find Precious sitting in a pile of stuffing in the middle of my bed, sulking ferociously, with a substantial hole dug straight through my already thin pillow. I glared at her and said, “Oh, don’t be a sore loser.” She gave me a narrow look out of her beady eyes and then turned her back and burrowed herself into the comfortable little nest of fluff.
We still weren’t talking the next morning, although with frigid courtesy she allowed me to put her in the bandolier cup to go upstairs to breakfast. She emitted a continuous stream of what I’m fairly certain were rude remarks from the moment Orion joined me, but they didn’t dampen his spirits; he beamed at me with delight and tried to take my hand again. I might have relented and let him have it for a dim stretch of the stairs going up, before we ran into other kids, all streaming up to the cafeteria.